Course Title: COGS 4960/6960 – Social Computing (Spring semester)
Location and Time: M, R 12:00—1:50pm
Instructor: Prof. Tomek Strzalkowski (tomek@rpi.edu)
Social computing is a research area at the intersection of computer science and social science, including psychology, sociology, communication, and linguistics. Its objective is to advance both fields by combining the power of data analytics, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence with the scientific method for studying human data and human behavior. Social science needs robust computer tools to make advances in the era of big, complex data; conversely, computer science needs guidance from social science theories on how to design and validate such tools. The Social Computing course will be a research seminar in which students will engage with research through a series of readings, understanding concepts in the social sciences about human language, attitudes, and behaviors and understand how these concepts can be formalized into computational models or algorithms.
PREREQUISITES
Basic understanding of algorithms and/or statistics is recommended.
COURSE OUTCOMES
This course is intended to introduce students to the field of social computing. Students are expected to achieve a comfortable level of thinking about concepts regarding human attitudes, behaviors and activities in computational terms. They will also become familiar with the state-of-the-art in this research area and, work on a research problem to extend the field or address an open issue.