Daniel Romero, associate professor in the School of Information as well as in the Center for the Study of Complex Systems and in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has joined the QMSS team this semester, teaching QMSS 251: Computational Social Sciences. Originally from Bogota Colombia, Professor Romero’s family moved to Arizona when he was a teenager. While in Arizona, he received his B.S. and M.S. in Mathematics from Arizona State University before getting his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University.
Receiving the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship from the University of Michigan in 2013, Professor Romero moved to Ann Arbor where he now resides with his wife and children. Shortly before the onset of the pandemic, they added a new member to their family. “We adopted a small dog named Coco, and he has been very happy to have his ‘pack’ going to school and working from home,” he said.
Since 2017, Professor Romero has worked closely with University of Michigan Associate Professor Elizabeth Bruch and the Social Science Initiative that she is leading. One of their ongoing goals is to develop interactive Python labs for U-M instructors who are interested in including computational social sciences in their courses. It is directly due to this project union that Romero is teaching QMSS 251. “It all started when Elizabeth Bruch asked me if I were interested in creating instructional labs for Social Science students interested in Computational Social Science who did not have much programming training. The idea sounded very appealing to me, so we started working on developing instructional materials that were not yet associated with any particular course, but that we thought would be useful for other existing courses at UM. The goal was to create labs that could show students all the interesting Social Science questions we can answer using data and computational methods, without having to get into the programming details. We hoped that students who work through our labs would be excited enough to go out and pick up programming skills and conduct their own Computational Social Science research in the future. Then, the opportunity of creating a course for QMSS came up and we realized that QMSS students were exactly the audience we were targeting.”
In addition, Professor Romero has written over 40 peer-reviewed publications and has played a role in securing 8 research grants totaling more than $1.8 million. In January of 2019, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research awarded Romero $450,000 for his research project, “Assessing the Impact of Exogenous Shocks on User Behavior and Information Diffusion in Social Media.” In October of 2019, the National Science Foundation awarded Romero and lead PI, Assistant Professor David Jurgens almost $500,000 for their research project, “CHS: Small: The Ties that Relate Us: Modeling the Impact of Relationships on Social Contagion and Network Dynamics.”
Of his research interests, he said, “I’m working on a variety of computational social science problems including modeling the diffusion of linguistic innovations on social media, understanding how people interact with others in social media when shocks such as natural disasters, layoffs, and breakups occur, studying how scientific findings diffuse on social media, and using network science techniques to develop more inclusive and effective ways for large groups to engage in deliberation. Most of the research that I’m working on is driven by my group’s desire to understand the behavioral dynamics of groups of people by analyzing data traces they generate as they interact with others on social media. These data enable us to discover patterns of behavior that would be very difficult to observe at the individual level.”
A topic covered in QMSS 251, curious students who wish to hear Romero explain text analysis can view this short YouTube video, Engineering an Advantage in Debates, which briefly explains a project involving linguistic matching in more recent presidential debates. Additionally, the professor participated in the QMSS “Quantitative Methods in My Work” speaker series. Interviewed by current QMSS students, he discusses his research, thoughts about how working with data is changing the workplace as well as material that is directly of interest to social scientists. “The goal of 251 is to make students aware of what is possible when we combine Social Science skills with computational skills and new data sources. I hope our students will be excited to continue developing their programming skills, and think about new research questions and creative ways to use data,” he said, adding, “At the same time, we are hoping that our students will be aware of the disadvantages and limitations of Computational Social Science and the serious ethical considerations we must keep in mind when we use sensitive data.”
Please click here to learn more about Professor Romero, or here to read more about the QMSS curriculum.
