Computing and the Social Sciences: The Opportunity at the Interface
Prabhakar Raghavan (Yahoo Research)
Info
|
Date |
7th November 2011 (week , Michaelmas Term 2011) |
|
Time |
10:00 |
|
Place |
Lecture Theatre A |
Abstract
The Web has highlighted the need for computer science to work closely with the social and economic sciences. By blending principles from mechanism design, algorithms, machine learning and massive distributed computing, search engines have become good at optimizing monetization on sound scientific principles. This represents a successful and growing partnership between computer science and microeconomics. When it comes to understanding how online users respond to the content and experiences presented to them, we have more of a lacuna in the collaboration between computer science and certain social sciences. Using a number of examples, we show that a critical element of this is the need to blend large-scale data analysis with smaller-scale focus groups and other techniques that are routine in the social sciences. We argue that this represents a need for a style of academic training - sociological insights driven by data mining - that does not exist today.
Further info
|
Related series |
|
