Computational Social Science

Computational Social Science (CSS) an Introduction

We are living in the age of technology and information, our each and every action is being recorded in the form of data and advancement in technology has allowed us to transmit that data very quickly on long distances. If we are driving our car and take exit on a city our car number get recorded in the visual camera and our exit information saved in our movement, after eating pizza or pratha on some restaurant in other city when we pay the bills through the

credit or debt card our transaction will be the signature of our place, time and activity, similarly if we are on airport and checking our black berry or email on net café then our activity is being recorded and can be followed. All of these forms of data could be helpful to connect people of common interests, common objectives or facing similar problems. Analysis patterns of group behaviors sharing common attributes has become a new challenge which is very requires different from currently existing mathematical, computational, sociological, and psychological tools.
Establishing relationships between people, through technology, on the basis of common interests, behaviors, movements, or profession has been termed as development of social networks. These social networks can be based on hobbies like stamp collectors, supporters of same football team like Barcelona, following advancements in science and technology like Bioinformatics, or discussing social issues like marriage and divorce growth rate. The study of such interactions is evolved to a new field of science i.e. Computational Social Sciences.
Computational social science helps us to study such massive amount of data from different view points. Such as computer scientists and mathematicians are always interested in finding new patterns, structures and information present in graphs, irrespective to their meaning. However, a consumer marketing analyst is more interested in finding buying pattern of people sharing common interest on internet etc.

Computational social science is an interdisciplinary filed of mathematics, computers, management, and psychology. Computational social science deals with the data related to human relationships like trust in an organization for team building or friendship in a society for community development. Connections or relationships between people in an organization or society in terms of formal or informal is represented with the help of graphs. In such graphs nodes represent people and edges represent their relationships.

Applications of Computational Social Sciences (CSS)

1. Behavioral patterns can be identified.
2. Supply chain networks can be studied by several ways i.e. who supplies whom? Who can continue supplies if one or two of his suppliers failed? Etc
3. Human resource management systems like who is the key integrator in different groups within an organization? or who is the most influential person in the organization (can be extracted from informal networks)
4. Trend analysis by relating crimes, behavior and locations.
Many other domains can be covered with CSS. In this blog I will try to discuss such problems, their solution methodologies, results, with theoretical and experimental foundations.

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