"In order to be competitive a global scale and bring Italy's education system to the European level, Italy should invest more in blending scientific tools with humanities and social sciences." (18/02/2021, prime minister Draghi to the Italian Parliament)
The Computational Social Science Centre (CSSC) aims to promote the use of computational science methods, tools and techniques to broaden the general analytical capacity of the social sciences. The Center is hosted by the Department of Political and Social Sciences (DSPS) with colleagues from other Departments of the University.
Mission - The Center has three fundamental tasks:
1. Research - in particular, the research group linked to the Centre would like to extend the attention to colleagues in the application of computing power to research in the social sciences, by also jointly applying for CINECA's computing capacity in experimental fields such as "simulated societies" (agent-based) or more specifically machine-learning. For example, in the development phase of an algorithm for understanding Chinese texts on public-private partnerships in the defence sector, the individual laptops at our disposal already show extensive limits in terms of computing capacity.
2. Encouraging education -students from the "Big Data for the Social Sciences" and "Methodology and Techniques for Data Analysis" courses showed great interest to deepen their obtained knowledge and are interested to participate in specific projects aiming to apply the tools learnt in class. This is also extended to their colleagues in order to spread the use of both R and Python among students and, in the long term, the development of specialised algorithms for research in their fields through machine-learning.
3. Promoting work outside the Department - in particular by developing collaborations between lecturers and students with (a) public bodies and (b) the private sector, in order to channel possible external resources for research grants and/or integration in current or upcoming research.
Keeping data analysis and cybersecurity under the same 'hat' is a practice that we have borrowed from the Rand Corporation https://www.rand.org/topics/cyber-and-data-sciences.html and which we, as the Centre, fully endorse.
The CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies) maintains a list of "Significant Cyber Incidents" on its website, reporting major cyber-attacks. The full list is available for download (PDF or Word).
Oltion Preka and Giampiero Giacomello, of the Computational Social Science Center (CssC), worked with Python's Pandas, Open Refine and some regular expressions to "transform" the list of events into a CSV file so that it is easier for interested scholars to perform (basic) quantitative analysis on those events.
In agreement with the CSIS, we make the CSV file available for download here. Please cite the source upon use.
