Thursday, September 7, 2017 - 4:00pm to Friday, September 8, 2017 - 3:55pm
Event Calendar Category
IDSS
Speaker Name
Matthew Salganik
Affiliation
Princeton University
Building and Room number
34-401B (Grier Room B)
Abstract
The digital age has transformed the ways that researchers are able to study
social behavior. These new opportunities mean that the future of social research will involve
combining approaches from social scientists and data scientists, a hybrid that is often called
computational social science. After providing some perspective on this growing field, the talk
will focus on the Fragile Families Challenge, a scientific mass collaboration involving hundreds
of social scientists and data scientists working together on a project to improve the lives of
disadvantaged children in the United States.
Biography
Matthew Salganik is Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, and he is affiliated with
several of Princeton's interdisciplinary research centers: the Office for Population Research,
the Center for Information Technology Policy, the Center for Health and Wellbeing, and the
Center for Statistics and Machine Learning. His research interests include social networks and
computational social science. He is the author of the forthcoming book Bit by Bit: Social
Research in the Digital Age.
Salganik's research has been published in journals such as Science, PNAS, Sociological
Methodology, and Journal of the American Statistical Association. His papers have won the
Outstanding Article Award from the Mathematical Sociology Section of the American
Sociological Association and the Outstanding Statistical Application Award from the
American Statistical Association. Popular accounts of his work have appeared in the New
York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, and New Yorker. Salganik's research is funded by
the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Joint United Nations Program
for HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), Russell Sage Foundation, Sloan Foundation, Facebook, and Google.
During sabbaticals from Princeton, he has been a Visiting Professor at Cornell Tech and a
Senior Research at Microsoft Research.