On August 21st, the opening ceremony of the 5th Huazhong Agricultural University - Imperial College of Technology Summer School on Methodology of Computational Social Science summer school was held in the M501 Lecture Hall of the Humanities and Social Sciences Building. The event was hosted by Zhanli (Jerry) Sun, Senior Researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies(IAMO), Germany.
At the opening ceremony, Xiong Hang, the professor at the School of Economics and Management, introduced the basic situation of the summer school. He mentioned that the methodology of computational social science training has been carried out for five consecutive years from 2019 to the present. Every year, Chinese and foreign lecturers jointly explore and meticulously refine to provide zero-start, systematic training in the theory, methodology and application of social simulation modeling.
Li Gucheng, Dean of the School of Economics and Management, welcomed the teachers and students who participated in the summer school. He stated that the school strongly supports research in the field of computational social sciences and hopes to fully leverage their respective advantages with research institutions such as Imperial University of Technology to jointly explore emerging, interdisciplinary, and cutting-edge academic products facing the world. He introduced the development and achievements of relevant disciplines and research in the college, and sincerely invited young scholars to cooperate and exchange ideas. I hope everyone can gain and apply what they have learned through training, and contribute to the development of computational social sciences.
The keynote speaker, Georgiy Bobashev, a senior researcher at the RTI International Data Science Center in the United States, expressed his honor to learn with dynamic young scholars. He believes that computational social science has a very promising future and that we need to use new technologies and methods to address future changes and challenges. He encouraged everyone to truly enjoy learning for science and the future. Speaking on behalf of the participants, Zhu Mengke, a doctoral student from the School of Public Administration of the Huazhong Agricultural University, said that it was difficult to have the opportunity to study computational social science systematically in the past, and he believed that everyone would definitely be able to gain something.
It is reported that this summer school mainly focuses on the fundamentals, methodologies and applications of computational social science, which will be taught in English for five days. The lecturers are Hang Xiong, Georgiy Bobashev, Professor Andreas Flache from the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Behavioral and Social Sciences, University of Groningen, the Netherlands, Professor Peng Lv from the School of Public Administration, Central South University, and Zhanli (Jerry) Sun. Nearly 100 young teachers, and master and doctoral students from 40 institutions at home and abroad, including the University of Munich, the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Peking University, Renmin University of China, Fudan University, Zhejiang University, Wuhan University, etc., participated in this study.
Written by Waner Ma
