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...

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...

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...