Computational Social Science

In Computational Social Science, we believe that data matters, because people matter. Across the many disciplines of social science, CSS scholars are at the forefront of understanding how small, large, internet-scale, and experimental data can be analyzed, understood, processed, transformed, and harnessed with the goal of allowing us to understand and help people as they live their lives. Whether their focus is on creation of new data-driven teaching methods, identifying and mitigating disinformation campaigns, understanding the role of 'AI' in our lives, studying what it means to think and learn, and hundreds of other questions, CSS scholars are using computational methods to address real issues, and teaching those valuable skills to students wanting to go into science, academia, government, business, and more.

UC San Diego offers Computational Social Science programs to train students in this exciting, interdisciplinary field at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Our CSS training combines coursework in formal models from across social science disciplines with modern computational data analysis techniques.  Most important of all, the hands-on curriculum provides substantive and varied practice applying these skillsets to real-world problems.  This integrative training prepares the next generation of scientists and practitioners to understand the past, explore the present, and build the future.