The Swedish Excellence Centre for Computational Social Science - SweCSS

The Swedish Excellence Center for Computational Social Science is a research hub and training center at the forefront of Computational Social Science (CSS), a rapidly growing field that leverages computational tools to advance our understanding of human behavior and the complex social dynamics it can bring about.

The Center is a joint initiative between the Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS) and the Department of Computer and Information Science (IDA), both at Linköping University. We collaborate with leading scientists in Sweden and abroad, we support innovative collaborative research constellations, and we offer postgraduate training. The Center is generously funded by a grant from the Swedish Research Council.

We promote research combining large-scale data, computational methods, and clearly articulated social-science theories to improve our understanding of society. Recent advances in machine learning, natural language processing, and agent-based modeling have paved the way for innovative collaborations between social scientists and computer scientists that jointly seek to answer fundamental questions of the social sciences and humanities in new and rigorous ways.

The increased availability of digital data and the substantial advances in the methods for manipulating and analyzing these types of “big data” have laid the foundation for the emergence of computational social science. Social scientists now have at their disposal data as well as methods that allow them to address traditional social-science questions at a scale and with a precision that previous generations of social scientists only could have dreamt of.

Research at SweCSS analyzes social dynamics using data on entire populations of interacting individuals, large text corpora capturing how people talk about the world they live in, and fine-grained digital trace data from online interactions. The SweCSS research agenda combines powerful data-science methods—machine learning, natural language processing, and agent-based simulation—with precisely articulated social-science theories to improve our understanding of how individuals collectively and often unintentionally reshape the world they inhabit.