Society and Networks

To understand how economic and political forces shape the geography and ownership of computing. To build computational foundations of future robust, resilient, and adaptive legal systems. To discover the microscopic mechanisms by which we expand and maintain our social networks. To portray our internet-mediated lives through digital behavioral data. These are just a few of our current research directions in the borderland between computational technology, society, and networks.

In an era of change, when computation, data, and AI govern ever more of our lives, the interface between the computational and social sciences is gaining importance. In fact, we not only study the technologies driving these changes, we also use them to understand the change itself, and its human causes and consequences. Our research area is unique in its breadth of methods and data: We combine insights from network science, sociology, economics, complex systems, machine learning, political science, and more. We use data from simulations, experiments, device traces, public registers, Internet infrastructure records, etc. We collaborate with scientists from all over the world and virtually every corner of academia. Finally, in addition to embracing the scientific ethos of understanding the world around us, we are also, at heart, engineers, actively trying to make it better.