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IC2S2 – 9th International Conference on Computational Social Science

IC2CS

9th International Conference on Computational Social Science

IC2S2 has emerged as the dominant conference at the intersection of social and computational science, bringing together researchers from around the world in economics, sociology, political science, psychology, cognitive science, management, computer science, statistics and the full range of natural and applied sciences committed to understanding the social world through large-scale data and computation.

IC2S2 has emerged as the dominant conference at the intersection of social and computational science, bringing together researchers from around the world in economics, sociology, political science, psychology, cognitive science, management, computer science, statistics and the full range of natural and applied sciences committed to understanding the social world through large-scale data and computation.

The conference will begin with a one-day session of tutorials in a range of social and computational methods (July 17). This will be followed by a full-scale three-day conference (July 18-20) featuring research and researchers from around the world, across a broad range of relevant fields, and working on all areas of computational social science to advance its many frontiers.

Unlike important social computing and associated computer science conferences, the IC2S2 community actively balances and maintains a conversation between social and computational scientists which integrates technological advances and opportunities with social scientific rigor and insight.

DIREC is co-sponsor of IC2S2.

Picture “Sunset at Nyhavn” courtesy of Jim Nix

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Phd school Previous events

Contemporary Computer Supported Cooperative Work Research

phd course

Contemporary Computer Supported Cooperative Work Research

This PhD course is for PhD students conducting their research within the areas of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human Centred Design – currently working on positioning their research theoretically to push the boundaries for the novel and contemporary research contributions in CSCW research.

Contemporary CSCW research – How to create the literature scaffolding of contemporary CSCW PhD research which link to foundational aspects of CSCW while pushing the CSCW research into new contemporary areas of research.

Theoretical themes include (but not limited to) Articulation work & Coordination, Classifications & Categories, Awareness & Translucence; Infrastructures & Invisible Work; Knowledge Sharing & Common Information Spaces.

Learning outcome

  • Develop CSCW research questions looking to the past and thinking about the future
  • Identify and discuss contemporary CSCW research literature directions
  • Analyze, and extend current CSCW research towards future contemporary research directions and frameworks

After the course, students will have a foundational base for developing their theoretical research framework for their CSCW thesis – which both connects to the past, while focus on future contemporary directions. 

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Phd school Previous events

PhD course: Confronting Data Through Design Methods

PHD Course

Confronting Data Through Design Methods

 
Join this new PhD course and explore different modes of inquiry with data-applying design methods.


The focus will be on the implications for researchers working in the fields of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Participatory Design (PD) and Critical Data Studies, but the course is open to PhD students from all areas of work and design studies.


Lectures by:



  • Majken Overgaard, who is heading CATCH known for its curatorial focus on the possibilities of imagining new technological futures as activism. She is an external lecturer at ITU and the co-founder of Korridor – a new digital art collective – investigating emerging culture and art online right now, such as blockchains, web3 and NFT.
  • James Auger, who is the director of the design department at LMF, ENS Paris-Saclay and co-director of the Centre de Recherche en Design (ENS & ENSCI). He is also an Associate Professor at RMIT (Europe). His work explores ways through which practice-based design research can lead to more considered and democratic technological futures.
  • Naja Holten Møller, who is an Associate Professor at DIKU. She is the founder of the Confronting Data Co-lab, a cooperation of scholars working and acting together in support of the stakeholders we encounter and engage with in our research, focusing on critical public technologies.

The participants gain knowledge of:

  • speculative design as a method
  • how to apply speculative design in practice,
  • and the criteria for evaluating research within this field.

The PhD course is organized by Ass. Prof. Naja L. Holten Møller and PhD fellow Trine Rask Nielsen and Kristin Kaltenhäuser from the University of Copenhagen with support from DIREC.

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Phd school Previous events

VaMos 2023

VaMos 2023

17th International Working Conference on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems

VaMoS brings together researchers and practitioners to share ideas, results, and experiences about the quest for mastering variability.

Most of today’s software is made variable to allow for more adaptability and economies of scale, while many development practices (e.g., DevOps, A/B testing, parameter tuning, continuous integration) support this goal of engineering software variants.

VaMoS is the ideal venue to explore the underlying problems (automation, traceability, combinatorial explosion) and their solutions. As such, in addition to its usual call for technical research papers, VaMoS strongly supports the participation of aspiring young researchers as well as practitioners from industry.

Find more info about VaMoS

With support of the Carlsberg Foundation and DIREC, the organizers offer 10 free registrations for the VaMoS conference to motivated PhD students or postdocs that wish to attend the conference.

See how to apply for free registration

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News Phd school Previous events

MOVEP 2022: Five Intensive Days on Modelling and Verification

17 JUNE 2022

MOVEP 2022: Five Intensive Days on Modelling and Verification

Automated systems like self-driving cars and AI-based decision support are becoming an increasingly large part of our everyday lives, and so is the need for modelling and verification of the software running these systems. At the MOVEP 2022 Summer School, hosted by the Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, leading researchers, students and people from the industry convened to discuss challenges and opportunities within this field.

By Stig Andersen, Aalborg University

The five-day MOVEP Summer School 2022 (June 13-17) on modelling and verification of parallel processes had attracted 70+ participants, primarily PhD students, but also people from the industry.

With the lecture hall of the Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology right at Aalborg’s harbour front as a great venue, they enjoyed a packed programme of talks and tutorials from 11 leading researchers on model checking, controller synthesis, software verification, temporal logics, real-time and hybrid systems, stochastic systems, security, run-time verification, etc.

An exciting field

One of the speakers was Christel Baier, Professor and Head of the chair for Algebraic and Logic Foundations of Computer Science at the Faculty of Computer Science of the Technische Universität Dresden, and together with Joost-Pieter Katoen, the author of a key publication in the field, Principles of Model Checking (MIT Press, 2008). She has been working within the broad field of verification and analysis techniques for stochastic operational models for more than twenty years.

– I really had not expected to work so long within this area, but as it often turns out in science, apparently simple problems are not at all simple and will require more research. So, if the students at this summer school would take the message that this is an exciting and very important field and choose to explore it further, I would be very happy. MOVEP is a very nice event, and being able to come to Denmark and not least being able to meet again after the Corona shutdown is really great, she says.

Application in different fields

Another speaker was Nir Piterman, Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Gothenburg and Chalmers, and a prominent figure within formal verification and automata theory. He kicked off the summer school programme Monday morning with a tutorial on reactive synthesis, which is a technique for automatically generating correct-by-construction reactive systems from high-level descriptions.

 – In my tutorial, I tried to give the participants a taste of the so-called discrete two-player turn-based games technique, where you think about the environment as one player and the system as another player. The interaction is like a game between the two, and the system has to come up with a strategy to satisfy some goal, he explains.

Nir Piterman also sees an event like MOVEP as a very good opportunity for young researchers to be exposed to concepts and techniques that they would not necessarily be exposed to otherwise.

– It is my hope that the talks and tutorials at this event will fertilize their work and provide them with new ideas about how to apply these techniques in different fields. One possible usage of two-player games is synthesis, but the usage could be wider and potentially applied to other problems, he says.

Nir Piterman is currently the holder of an ERC consolidator grant to study the usage of reactive synthesis for multiple collaborating programs.

Explainability

In her tutorial, Christel Baier focused on explication, which refers to a mathematical concept that in some way sheds light on why a verification process has returned a given result.

– Explainability is important. We have to make systems more understandable to everyone – scientists, designers, users, etc. Today, everybody is an IT user, so this is not only relevant for computer scientists, she says.
According to Christel Baier, there is a higher purpose:

– Since systems make decisions, users should have the opportunity to understand why decisions were made. Moreover, users should be supported in making decisions by themselves and be given an understanding of the configuration of these systems and their possible effects. Again, it comes down to the question of cause and effect, which was a recurring theme of my tutorial.

The research on the results presented by Christel Baier at her tutorial has been carried out within and is motivated by the missions of the collaborative projects “Center for Perspicuous Computing (CPEC)” and “Centre for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop (CeTI)”.

Correct-by-construction

Research within modelling and verification of parallel processes may also explore the question: Could we automatically generate systems that perform exactly according to the specifications instead of checking afterwards that they do? Nir Piterman dealt with this topic in his tutorial.

– Techniques to automatically generate correct-by-construction reactive systems from high-level descriptions have been explored in academia for quite a number of years. It has proven to work in some domains, but it would not be realistic to set as an ambition to build one synthesizer that you feed a specification to and expect it to auto-generate safe and error-free systems for all possible programming domains, he says.

According to Nir Piterman, the most successful applications so far have been within robotics. However, this success makes us think about what is the meaning of correct-by-construction.

– What does “correct” really mean? If it means that the system does exactly what was described in the specification, what happens if the specification is flawed? So, the focus of the correctness problem might change: Rather than making sure that the system matches the specification, the task is to ensure that the specification is thorough enough and reflects what the designer had in mind.

FURTHER INFORMATION

  • MOVEP 2022 is hosted by the Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University (primary organizer Martin Zimmermann, Associate Professor) and co-sponsored by DIREC an S4OS.
  • The first five editions of MOVEP took place in Nantes (France) every other year from 1994 to 2002. It then moved to Brussels (Belgium) in 2004, Bordeaux (France) in 2006, Orléans (France) in 2008, Aachen (Germany) in 2010, Marseille (France) in 2012, Nantes (France) in 2014, Genova (Italy) in 2016, Cachan (France) in 2018 and online in 2020.
  • More info on the MOVEP 2022 website.

CONTACT
Martin Zimmermann
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science
Aalborg University
Mail: mzi@cs.aau.dk
Phone: +45 9940 8770

Stig Andersen
Communications Officer
Department of Computer Science
Aalborg University
Mail: stan@cs.aau.dk
Phone: +45 4019 7682

Professor Nir Piterman, University of Gothenburg and Chalmers

Professor Christel Baier, Technische Universität Dresden