GESIS Computational Social Science Winter Symposium, 2016

Several students and staff members of SELS attended an international conference, GESIS CSS Winter Symposium 2016, which was taking place Cologne (Germany) on November, 30, andl December, 1.

Our Laboratory has been presenting results of our research at this conference since 2014. Computational social science is one of the most rapidly developing research fields in the HSE. Every year our students and staff members prepare their presentations for such international events. This conference brings together programmers and researchers in the areas of computer sciences and sociology.  Thanks to the participants from various disciplines, the presenters can show their results in front of a very diverse audience, get comments from more experienced colleagues and make contacts with experts from various research centers. 
Several well known researchers were key speakers at this conference. For example, Krishna Gummadi made a presentation on discrimination in algorithmic decision making, and Marko Grobelnik presented his study on cross-lingual media monitoring. The presentations at plenary sessions were also very interesting and brought up many questions, which sparkled a lively discussion. Noshir Contractor closed the conference with his most interesting talk on the role of big data in the social sciences. Students had been looking forward to this talk since the last year conference.
Several of our own research reports were accepted for poster sessions. Daria Kharkina made a poster on music preferences, which was based on the data collected from Last.fm and VK.com. Denis Bulygin presented a poster about value construction in the online game Dota2. Stanislav Pozdnyakov, Anastasia Kuznetsova, and Viktor Karepin analyzed the web presence of Russian universities and their scientometric indicators. Victor Karepin and Daria Chuprina presented a study on educational migration flows from Russia to China.
Even more interesting events took place before the poster session. There was a Pecha Kucha, at which participants had 2 minutes to talk about their work and draw attention to their poster. Our students were the youngest researchers at this conference. Most of the participants were from Master and postgraduate programs.