UC-wide MOOC Specialization voted BEST OF ALL TIMES online courses
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Only a few months after its launch, our Specialization in Computational Social Science already made it into the top-100 of "The Best Online Courses of ALL-TIME" on the aggregator ClassCentral. Some 35,000 learners are studying this material with professors from all 10 campuses of the University of California. It is the first UC-wide online course of its kind. There are 5 Courses in this Specialization: check out the other ones!Computational Social Science Methods Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Ethics Computational Social Science Capstone Project
Here is some of the feedback we got from students after completion:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> COURSE DESCRIPTIONS: Computational Social Science Methods This course gives you an overview of the current opportunities and the omnipresent reach of computational social science. The results are all around us, every day, reaching from the services provided by the world’s most valuable companies, over the hidden influence of governmental agencies, to the power of social and political movements. All of them study human behavior in order to shape it. In short, all of them do social science by computational means. In this course, we answer three questions: I. Why Computational Social Science (CSS) now? II. What does CSS cover? III. What are examples of CSS? In this last part, we take a bird’s-eye view on four main applications of CSS. First, Prof. Blumenstock from UC Berkeley discusses how we can gain insights by studying the massive digital footprint left behind today’s social interactions, especially to foster international development. Second, Prof. Shelton from UC Riverside introduces us to the world of machine learning, including the basic concepts behind this current driver of much of today's computational landscape. Prof. Fowler, from UC San Diego introduces us to the power of social networks, and finally, Prof. Smaldino, from UC Merced, explains how computer simulation help us to untangle some of the mysteries of social emergence.
Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Ethics This course gives you context and first-hand experience with the two major catalyzers of the computational science revolution: big data and artificial intelligence. With more than 99% of all mediated information in digital format and with 98% of the world population using digital technology, humanity produces an impressive digital footprint. In theory, this provides unprecedented opportunities to understand and shape society. In practice, the only way this information deluge can be processed is through using the same digital technologies that produced it. Data is the fuel, but machine learning it the motor to extract remarkable new knowledge from vasts amounts of data. Since an important part of this data is about ourselves, using algorithms in order to learn more about ourselves naturally leads to ethical questions. Therefore, we cannot finish this course without also talking about research ethics and about some of the old and new lines computational social scientists have to keep in mind. As hands-on labs, you will use IBM Watson’s artificial intelligence to extract the personality of people from their digital text traces, and you will experience the power and limitations of machine learning by teaching two teachable machines from Google yourself.
This course is designed to quite literally ‘make a science’ out of something at the heart of society: social networks. Humans are natural network scientists, as we compute new network configurations all the time, almost unaware, when thinking about friends and family (which are particular forms of social networks), about colleagues and organizational relations (other, overlapping network structures), and about how to navigate delicate or opportunistic network configurations to save guard or advance in our social standing (with society being one big social network itself). While such network structures always existed, computational social science has helped to reveal and to study them more systematically. In the first part of the course we focus on network structure. This looks as static snapshots of networks, which can be intricate and reveal important aspects of social systems. In our hands-on lab, you will also visualize and analyze a network with a software yourself, which will help to appreciate the complexity social networks can take on. During the second part of the course, we will look at how networks evolve in time. We ask how we can predict what kind of network will form and if and how we could influence network dynamics.
Big data and artificial intelligence get most of the press about computational social science, but maybe the most complex aspect of it refers to using computational tools to explore and develop social science theory. This course shows how computer simulations are being used to explore the realm of what is theoretically possible. Computer simulations allow us to study why societies are the way they are, and to dream about the world we would like to live in. This can be as intuitive as playing a video game. Much like the well-known video game SimCity is used to build and manage an artificial city, we use agent-based models to grow and study artificial societies. Without hurting anyone in the real world, computer simulations allow us to explore how to make the world a better place. We play hands-on with several practical computer simulation models and explore how we can combine hypothetical models with real world data. Finally, you will program a simple artificial society yourself, bottom-up. This will allow you to feel the complexity that arises when designing social systems, while at the same time experiencing the ease with which our new computational tools allow us to pursue such daunting endeavors.
Computational Social Science Capstone Project CONGRATULATIONS! Not only did you accomplish to finish our intellectual tour de force, but, by now, you also already have all required skills to execute a comprehensive multi-method workflow of computational social science. We will put these skills to work in this final integrative lab, where we are bringing it all together. We scrape data from a social media site (drawing on the skills obtained in the 1st course of this specialization). We then analyze the collected data by visualizing the resulting networks (building on the skills obtained in the 3rd course). We analyze some key aspects of it in depth, using machine learning powered natural language processing (putting to work the insights obtained during the 2nd course). Finally, we use a computer simulation model to explore possible generative mechanism and scrutinize aspects that we did not find in our empirical reality, but that help us to improve this aspect of society (drawing on the skills obtained during the 4th course of this specialization). The result is the first glimpse at a new way of doing social science in a digital age: computational social science. Congratulations! Having done all of this yourself, you can consider yourself a fledgling computational social scientist! |