Computational social science is coming to Finland, says Helsingin Sanomat

Helsingin Sanomat predicted eight science stories for the year 2016. These included the usual suspects of the Hyperloop, the cousine of the Higgs boson and the Rosetta mission. It also included a highlight about big data and computational methods entering the social sciences, promoting two works HIIT is involved: the Digivaalit 2015 and the Digital Humanities of Public Policy Making. Both of these research projects have applied machine learning to solve questions critical in social science, such as

• Who influences the media agenda during elections?
• What kind of interaction social media affords between the citizen and politicians?
• How have the party alignments changed during the last 100 years?
• How can we automate detection of deliberation?

HIIT is also strongly involved in teaching these skills to the new generations of social scientists at University of Helsinki through the computational social science study program, where we teach social scientists to program and apply data-driven tools.