Fifteen years ago, as an undergraduate computer science student in the UK, I read a popular science article (Matthews, 1999) pro\ufb01ling the research of my now colleague, Duncan Watts. This article, about the science of small-world networks, changed my life. To understand why, though, it\u2019s necessary to know that in the UK, there is (or at least was during the 1980s and 1990s) a profound \u201dthem-versus-us\u201d split between the STEM1 \ufb01elds and all other disciplines. This split is ampli\ufb01ed or perhaps even caused by the fact that people specialize very young \u2014 choosing, at age \ufb01fteen or sixteen, whether they will ever take another math course or write another essay again. I, like every one else in my degree program, had chosen STEM, but my decision hadn\u2019t been easy \u2014 I had also wanted to study the social sciences. The article about Duncan\u2019s research changed my life because it had never before occurred to me that that math and computers could be used to study social phenomena. For the \ufb01rst time, I realized that rather than studying either computer science or the social sciences, perhaps I could study both. This, then, became my motivating goal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fifteen years ago, as an undergraduate computer science student in the UK, I read a popular science article (Matthews, 1999) pro\ufb01ling the research of my now colleague, Duncan Watts. This article, about the science of small-world networks, changed my life. To understand why, though, it\u2019s necessary to know that in the UK, there is (or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13559],"msr-publication-type":[193721],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-215391","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-social-sciences","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"Cambridge University Press","msr_edition":"Computational Social Science: Discovery and 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