BRAND NEW:
CMPLXSYS 325/EEB 325 - CSCS and EEB Assistant Professor Luis Zaman will teach 'Memes, Measles and Misinformation'. This course explores how contagious processes can help us understand a range of different phenomena observed in the real world—from infectious disease transmission, to the spread of information, misinformation, and disinformation...click for full course description.
Meets MSA; BS; and (QR/1) requirements
CMPLXSYS 351 - In addition we are offering a new Mini-Course (2 credits) 'Introduction to Social Science Data'. This course will provide an introduction to the programming language Python as a tool for loading, manipulating, and exploring social science datasets. We will begin with basic Python syntax and progress to more complicated tasks such as parsing, cleaning, imputing, and visualizing data, and we will pay particular attention to the skills needed and challenges faced when working with social science data. The bulk of the work in this course will be reading and coding a set of five lab assignments and a final project. Prior experience with Python is not required. click for full course description.
Meets MSA requirement.
BACK FOR THE SECOND YEAR:
CMPLXSYS 251/SOC 251 - 'Computational Social Sciences' will be offered for the second time this winter. Along with 351 this course was developed through the Computational Social Science Initiative. This course sits at the intersection of computer science, statistics, and social science. 'Due to the growth in electronic sources such as cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, and other online platforms, researchers now have enormous amounts of data about every aspect of our lives ...This has led to a revolution in social science, as we are able to measure human behavior with precision largely thought impossible just a decade ago..' click for full course description.
Meets SS, QR/1 requirements.
CMPLXSYS 391/POLSCI 391 - Re-introduced in Winter 2022, CSCS is happy to be able to once again offer the popular course 'Modeling Political Processes'. This class provides an introduction to modeling people and social systems. We learn to construct, manipulate, and evaluate models of people who vote, work, commit crimes, and attend classes. We cover concepts and ideas from game theory, learning theory, complexity theory, and even biology and physics (at a metaphorical level of course.) Though the topics and techniques covered are wide ranging — we analyze among other things the wisdom of crowds, the spread of ideas, the causes of racial segregation, and the emergence of riots, they aggregate into a deep methodological coherence. ...click for full course description.
Meets BS, SS, QR/1 requirements.
