An increasing fraction of human interactions are digitally captured. These digital breadcrumbs create enormous opportunities for ground breaking social science, to look at societal phenomena at a scale and granularity heretofore impossible. This talk will discuss what some of the potential scientific opportunities are, as well the potential barriers to the emergence of a “computational social science".

In The Clash of Civilizations, Samuel Huntington challenged the prevailing consensus that the axes of international geo-political alignments reflect economic and ideological divisions. Based on a top-down analysis of the alignments of nation states, Huntington famously concluded, “The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural.” On the 20th anniversary of the publication of Huntington’s thesis, we revisit his analysis, taking instead a bottom-up...

Social systems may be viewed as complex multi-component systems. But given the cognitive features and the diversity of social agents, is it possible to develop explanatory theories of social phenomena, and if so, how? What are the potentials and limitations of a quantitative approach? And how to put social theories to the test, or apply them? What can physics contribute to the progress of this field? These questions will be addressed with examples from opinion formation, pedestrian, crowd,...

Each of us is embedded in and understands the world through networks. These networks, such as the social network, the knowledge network, the capabilities network constrain and enable behavior. This set of complex, evolving, multi-mode, multi-link networks form a complex socio-technical system that can be documented and analyzed using meta-networks. Meta-Networks are high dimensional interlinked multi-mode and multi-link networks that can vary by time and space. They can be rapidly extracted...

We introduce the ``reflexivity'' index that quantifies the relative importance of short-term endogeneity for financial markets (financial indices, future commodity markets) from mid-2000s to October 2012. Our reflexivity index is defined as the average ratio of the number of price moves that are due to endogenous interactions to the total number of all price changes, which also include exogenous events. It is obtained by calibrating the Hawkes self-excited conditional Poisson model on time...

The availability of big datasets on social phenomena has opened new exciting perspectives for researchers. Especially the Web, with its jungle of social Websites and data repositories, has transformed the way we study social behavior at all scales, leading to the new discipline of computational social science. Large numbers enforce the adoption of statistical techniques, aiming at the identification of regular patterns from the apparently erratic behavior of single individuals. The concepts...