On 24 May 2023, the 30th Xi Xian Academic Luncheon, co-organised by IIDPF and the School of Public Finance and Taxation, was successfully held in Conference Room 119, Wenqin Building. As the keynote speaker of this academic luncheon, Associate Professor Gong Weizang from the School of Sociology, Wuhan University delivered a keynote speech entitled Big Data, Cloud Computing and the Practice of Computational Social Science. The forum was chaired by Dr Gao Sihan, a full-time researcher at IIDPF, and attended by more than 30 faculty members and students, including researchers Dr Wan Qian, Dr Wan Xin, Dr Zou Wei and Dr Zhang Fan.
With the rise of the digital society, computational social science has a whole new future. The mission of computational social science is that it is no longer the questions themselves that matter, but the combination of big data and machine learning methods to improve the quality of the answers to the questions and to promote a paradigm shift in social science research. Based on this concept, Dr Gong focuses on big data types such as social media big data, news opinion big data and digital platform big data, and introduces in detail several practical cases of computational social science research based on the arithmetic power and algorithms of cloud computing.
Associate Professor Gong Weizang gave a fascinating talk to the faculty and students in the audience and at the same time stimulated deeper thinking about big data. In the discussion session, the participating PhDs exchanged and discussed relevant issues, and the students also spoke enthusiastically and had active interaction around data types and research methods.