As digital technologies, the internet and social media become increasingly integrated into society, a proliferation of digital footprints of human and societal behaviors are generated in our daily lives. All these data provide opportunities to study complex social systems, by the empirical observation of patterns in large-scale data, quantitative modelling and experiments.

The social data revolution enables not only new business models but it also provides policy makers with better instruments to support their decisions.

This conference aims at stimulating the debate among scholars of different disciplines about the so-called “data revolution” in social research. Statisticians, computer scientists and domain experts in social research will discuss the opportunities and challenges of the social data revolution to create a fertile ground for addressing new research problems. The 3rd international conference on Data Science & Social Research aims at stimulating the debate among scholars of different disciplines about the so-called “data revolution” in social research.

The Data Science and Social Research international conference encourages contributions about:

1. new methodological developments to extract social knowledge from large-scale datasets;
2. new social research about human behavior and society with large datasets, either mined from various sources (e.g. social media, communication systems) or created via controlled experiments;
3. integrated systems to take advantage of new social data sources;
4. big data quality issues, both as reformulation of traditional representativeness and validity and as emerging quality aspects such as access constraints, which may produce inequalities.