Social computing around us: participants of the Research Group at the International Student Conference

On the 2-3rd of February the international student conference was held in Higher School of Economics in Saint-Petersburg. It gathered many young researchers from Russia, as well as from near abroad. Members of the Research Group presented their results at the “Social Informatics: Internet Research, Social Media, Computer Games etc.” section.

Denis Bulygin presented the results of his research on formation prices of virtual products in the Dota2 case. Ksenia Konstantinova reported about online communication in cybersports. Their papers were discussed in detail during the first seminar of the Research Group, where they received some valuable advice on how to improve their papers for the conference. Stanislav Pozdnyakov and Alina Bakhitova told about the results of comparison students of minor “Data Science” before and after the online component implementation into the studying process. Stanislav Pozdnyakov, Viktor Karepin and Anastasiнa Kuznetsova presented the results of their research of Russian universities in North-West region, where they combined the analysis of the bibliometric indicators and webometrics, which allowed them to analyze not only the publication activity but also the representation of the university on the Web.

“Student conferences at HSE became a real academic tradition, which gives us an opportunity to learn about what other students do. From the one hand, we are all students, but we conduct absolutely different researches. For example, one boy from Ukraine, being a computer scientist, asked me a lot about “why do you use R and not Python?”. We also were able to provide some advice for girls from Belorussia about developing and improving their research in educational analytics. As I am mostly interested in quantitative data analysis, it was very informative for me to learn what other sociology-students do in qualitative analysis.”
Anastasiya Kuznetsova
Undergraduate student of BA “Sociology”, participant of the Research Group

Also members of our Research Group and students of “Sociology and Social Informatics” had a chance to attend the meeting with Frode Guribye, Associate Professor, Department of Information Science and Media Studies, University of Bergen, Norway. Frode studies human online and offline behavior using various indices of their activity: chat-logs(from on-line chats, messengers) and other digital finger-prints, uniting them with observation and action count. He shared his ideas on his projects, what attracted all listeners’ attention. Not only professors but also students were able to hold a discussion.

“Only half of the first year of my studying has passed, but I have already visited a seminar with Norwegian scientist Frode Guribye. I was really excited, because it was the first such event for me. After meeting it seemed to me that social informatics could be used everywhere. For example, Frode told us about one of his project, aim of of which is to make a device for the help to people with bipolar, ADHD and other illnesses. In my opinion, it is just amazing. I am so glad about meeting this man, and I hope there will be more such events in the future as well!”

Ekaterina Marchenko
Undergraduate student of BA “Sociology and Social Informatics”