HSE Students Attend Winter Symposium in Computational Social Science 2016

On November 30 - December 1, 2016,  twelve bachelor’s students from educational programmes in Sociology and Social Informatics, Asian and African Studies, Logistics and Supply Chain Management and Economics and HSE lecturers Daniil Aleksandrov, Alena Suvorova, and Ilya Musabirov took part in the Winter Symposium in Computational Social Science held in Cologne.

The Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (GESIS) has created a department for social informatics and big data in sociology, and organized the Winter Symposium in Computational Social Science, which brings together researchers in sociology, economics and computer science. This year saw the 3rd symposium held in Cologne.

Presenting to a multidisciplinary audience gives researchers the opportunity to discuss their work with researchers from different backgrounds, receive comments from more experienced colleagues, and meet with specialists from different research centres.

This year not only HSE sociologists, but also BA students took part in the event. Computational social science is developing rapidly at HSE, engaging young researchers in different fields.

‘The participation of our students had a noticeable impact. I was often asked 'Did you bring students to the event for the second time? That's a great idea!’ says Daniil Alexandrov, Deputy Director of HSE Campus in St. Petersburg and Dean of the St. Petersburg School of Social Sciences and Humanities.

Four poster projects for the HSE students and staff members were presented at the symposium. Daria Kharkina discussed musical preferences based on an analysis of data from Last.fm and vk.com. Denis Bulygin made a poster about the formation of merchandise value in Dota2. Stanislav Pozdnyakov, Anastasia Kuznetsova and Viktor Karepin analyzed the web presence of Russian universities and their scientometric indicators. Victor Karepin and Daria Chuprina presented a study of migration flows from Russia to China.