Source: Think Links

As a computer scientist, I’ve always found it inspirational talking to people from other disciplines. There are always interesting problems where computational techniques could be applied and also questions about what we would have to improve in order to use technology in these disciplines. I also know from talking to a range of people (biologists, communication scientists, etc) that they often feel excited about the opportunity to work with cutting edge computer science.

But even with excitement on both sides, it is hard to engage in interdisciplinary work. We are often pulled to our own communities for a variety of reasons (incentives, social structure, vocabulary…) and even when we do engage, it is often only for the length of one project. Afterwards, the collaboration dwindles.

The VU (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) through the Network Institute has been putting effort in trying to increase and extend interdisciplinary engagement. In June, Iina Hellsten and I organized a half-day symposium for discussion about collaborations between social science and computer science. It was successful in two respects:

The meeting started by breaking into three groups where we spent about 40 minutes generating concrete collaboration ideas in the context of the 4 challenges and 4 opportunities identified at the last meeting. We ensured that each group had members from computer science and social science. After that session each group presented their top 3 ideas. Groups were good at using the “technology”:

After this session, the group selected three areas of interest and then discussed how these could be concretely acted upon.

Here are the results:

1. Advertising collaborations

One issue that came up was the difficulty in knowing what the other discipline was doing and whether collaboration would be helpful.

• Announcement of talks on a central site. Simply, if the agent simulation group in CS is having a talk perhaps the organization architectures social science group would want to know about it. We thought we could use the Network Institute Linked In Group for this.
• Consulting. I thought this was a fun idea… Here, one could advertise their willingness to spend 1/2, 1, or two days with a person from the other discipline advising and helping them out with no expectations on either side. For example, if a social scientist wanted to have help running a large scale analysis, a computer scientist could help for a day without expecting to have to continue to help. Likewise, a computer scientist wanting a social scientist to check if their paper on analyzing twitter was theoretically sound, the social scientist could spend a half day with them. It was proposed that the Network Institute could offer incentives for this.

2. Interdisciplinary master and PhD student projects.
Collaborating through students can provide a way to build longer lasting collaborations.

• One initiative would be to advertise co-supervised masters projects hopefully as soon as this November.
• Since PhD students usually require funding, it was felt there needs to be more collaboration on obtaining research funding between faculties. One challenge here is knowing what calls could be targeted. To attack this problem, we thought the subsidy desk at the VU could start a special email list for interdisciplinary calls.

3. Processing large-scale data
Large scale data (from the web or otherwise) was of interest to a big chunk of the people in the room. There was a feeling that it would be nice to know what sorts of data sets people have or what data sets they were looking for.

• As a first step, we imagine a structured event sometime in 2011 where participants would present the data sets they have or what data sets they are looking for, and what analysis they aim to do. The aim of the event would be to try and build one-to-one connections across disciplines.

I think the group as a whole felt that these ideas could be straightforwardly put into practice and would lead to deeper and lasting collaborations between social and computer science. It would be great to hear your ideas along with comments and questions below.

Filed under: academia Tagged: collaboration, computer science, network institute, social science, vu

Source: Think Links

One of the things that I think is great about the VU (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) where I work is the promotion of interdisciplinary work through organizations like the Network Institute.  Computer Science is often known for interacting with biology, physics, and economics but we are now seeing the application of computing to Social Science problems. This is great for CS because domains often introduce new fundamental CS problems.

To talk about the overlap and potential opportunities for greater Social Science and Computer Science collaboration at the VU, Iina Hellsten (from Organization Science) and I organized a half-day symposium on Tuesday, June 29, 2010. We had a great environment for the discussion in the Intertain Lab (a space for investigating new interactive environments).

We had 17 participants about half from the Social Sciences (covering organization science, communication science, to psychology)  and half from Computer Science.

We started off with talks setting the scene from myself (on the CS side) and Peter Groenewegen and then moved to a series of shorter talks giving us a glimpse of the different focuses of some of the attendees. Even during these talks, there was clearly excitement about the possibilities for collaboration and there were several interesting conversations about the work itself.

The last part of the symposium was a session where we identified challenges and opportunities. We ran this as a post-it note session where each participant wrote two challenges and two opportunities on post it notes. (I got this idea from Katy Börner at her NSF Workshop on Mapping of Science and the Semantic Web. Thanks Katy!). Amazingly, these post-it notes always cluster together. Below is an image of the results of the session:

The group identified 8 different groupings of the 60 challenges and opportunities listed by the participants. They were:

1. How do we bridge the vocabulary gap between social science and computer science?
2. We have the opportunity to build new applications using insights from social science.
3. Writing new proposals and fundraising.
4. Knowing who in the other discipline is working on a particular subject and maintaining connections between the disciplines.
5. Being able to answer new research questions.
6. Having an opportunity to apply research results in the “real world”.
7. Automating parts of social science analysis (think network extraction from data sets).
8. Overcoming the differing research styles of the two disciplines especially in terms of publication cycles.

Below we list the actual text of the post-it notes grouped into the 8 areas.

The outcome of the symposium is that now that we’ve identified clusters of challenges and opportunities, we need to focus on concrete collaborations to address these areas. We will hold another session in September to discuss concrete actions.

Overall, this event showed me that at the VU, we have both the right structures but the right people to engage in this sort of interdisciplinary research.

Results of Post-it Note Session:

Filed under: academia Tagged: computational social science, post-it notes, symposium, vu unviersity amsterdam