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The Central Role of Social Sciences in the Era of AI

In this recent paper, the experts interviewed indicates the social sciences as one of the relevant elements of AI policies of the future: C. Weir, A. Dyson, O. Jogunola, L. Dennis and K. Paxton-Fear, "Interlinked Computing in 2040: Safety, Truth, Ownership, and Accountability," in Computer, vol. 57, no. 1, pp. 59-68, Jan. 2024, doi: 10.1109/MC.2023.3318377.
keywords: {Market research; Safety; Complexity theory; Artificial intelligence; Interconnected systems}.

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New Volume Out (in Italian) - Cybersicurezza: Che cos'è e come funziona by Gabriele D'Angelo & Giampiero Giacomello (Il Mulino, Bologna)

Cyberspace and cybersecurity are terms that have now entered common language, many know that, in some way, cybersecurity has to do with passwords and software updates; while only a few know that it also concerns spam and phishing, but almost no one knows what a/symmetric key cryptography, «0days» and APTs (Advanced Persistent Threats) can be. This is more than understandable, given that cyberspace and the digitalization processes underway today in any sector of social and economic activities are not easy or immediate to understand. By presenting issues ranging from the confidentiality of communications and personal data to elections via the Internet, from cybercrime and cyberterrorism to cyber weapons and cyberwarfare, the aim is to help the reader orient themselves in the transformation process resulting from digitalisation and to understand the central role that cybersecurity has in all of this.

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Analysis: Russian Military Bloggers

To what extent are the pro-Russian military bloggers on Telegram united in assessing the actions of the Russian generals?

Military bloggers have become an important part of the media landscape, covering the war for the Russian audience, and their popularity also affects discussion in mainstream media about the management of the war, thus indirectly affecting the decisions on the battlefield. Therefore, understanding the “digital arena” of milbloggers is essential to comprehending the dynamics of reciprocal influence between media discussion and political behavior. In this short post, we decided to look at how unified the coverage of the activities of the military command by the authors of these telegram channels is. However, this is only a preliminary analysis.

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Cyber Mondays are back!

The CssC has prepared a new series of Cyber Mondays. Every Monday we offer a short and interesting lecture about computational social sciences and its application.

Visit our page to enrol.

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Events at CssC

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We are on Mastodon!

Good news! The Computational Social Science Centre is now on Mastodon.

Follow us to keep up to date with the latest news in computational social science, social and political science and more.

@CssC@sciences.social

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Our Work on the Russia-Ukraine War

The CssC engages with the most relevant contemporary topics. The armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine has been one of our main focal points. Visit our page to get an overview of our research and data analysis on the Russia-Ukraine war.

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SICSS2021 students publish a study on sports politicisation in the Italian Twitter space

Owing to their popularity, sports often turn into arenas for political contestation. The practice of taking the knee as a symbolic stance against racism was started in 2016 and is entrenched with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. This practice generated discussions in the Italian public opinion during Euro 2020, where the ambiguous stance of the Italian soccer team contributed to the debate. This article addresses this particular case as an example of more widespread practices of antiracist contestation (and public opinion reactions thereto) in sports, approaching Italian public opinion studies from the underexplored angle of computational social science. We collected tweets featuring the hashtag #iononmiinginocchio (and its variations) throughout the duration of Euro 2020. The language used was analysed through network analysis and toxicity analysis to observe the characteristics of the debate and the rhetoric employed. This research finds that, despite politicians’ media visibility throughout the debate, the Twitter discussion was mainly driven by common citizens. In this context, a toxic language encompassing white supremacist, homophobic, and sexist remarks was often employed with a silencing effect on a wide share of the Twitter usership.

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