Computational social science and social computing

Computational social science is an emerging research area at the intersection of computer science, statistics, and the social sciences, in which novel computational methods are used to answer questions about society. The field is inherently collaborative: social scientists provide vital context and insight into pertinent research questions, data sources, and acquisition methods, while statisticians and computer scientists contribute expertise in developing mathematical models and computational tools. New, large-scale sources of demographic, behavioral, and network data from the Internet, sensor networks, and crowdsourcing systems augment more traditional data sources to form the heart of this nascent discipline, along with recent advances in machine learning, statistics, social network analysis, and natural language processing.