Reflections from IC2S2 2025

I (Ethel Mensah) had the privilege of attending the 11th International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2) in Norrköping Sweden, last month. I work got accepted for a poster presentation at the conference. It was a very insightful experience – not just interacting with other researchers but also learning from their work and pondering on what I could apply it to my own work.

 

 

From the tutorial session on Scalable Analysis of GPS Human Mobility Data with Applications to Socio-Spatial Inequality where they used mobile data, I was reminded of biases that result from the chosen method of analysis or from the data cleaning process. I also became aware of some libraries that could help with managing and processing large amounts of data and the concept of the of the levy flight model of travel (a type of random walk).

Additionally, I was enlightened by the tutorial session on computational social science for sustainability in line with the United Nations sustainability goals.

I attended the parallel sessions I attended were on mobility& urban science and those on inequality & Segregation. Listening to researchers present their work during these sessions was refreshing a reminder to pay attention to the relevance of the type of data used in answering the research questions – granularity, temporal resolution and the subsequent methods.

The keynote sessions were also particularly insightful and invited a lot of discussion on the current state of computational social science, touching on the open ended question on who should be validating models human or machines or even the definitions of the subjectiveness of social science terms such as ethnicity, race, etc. that computer scientists seek to measure.

Aside sharing my work with other researchers there were substantial interests that I believe would yield some great collaborations in the very near future.

I am so glad I got to visit the beautiful Swedish city Norrkoping!