Interdisciplinary AI Symposium - hosted by the Society & Culture and Digital, Data Science & AI Spotlights
AI and society: Social physics, or the interpretative turn?
An interdisciplinary symposium at the University of Warwick
23/24 June 2025 in the Oculus building
Register to attend using the sign-up form below!
There is increasing overlap and exchange between computational, mathematical and social sciences in an age defined by AI. More and more social researchers take up computational methods, while computational scientists analyse intrinsically social phenomena. Furthermore, during the last few decades new areas of research have emerged at the interface between social sciences and computational sciences, such as computational social science and digital sociology. This symposium will explore the overlaps and exchanges between these various fields with a special focus on foundational concepts and methodological principles.
Topic
In the trading zone (Galison, 2010) between social and computational science, new possibilities and fundamental questions arise. Some argue that the combination of AI and big data will make possible the discovery of social laws (Lazer, 2023). Others claim that machine learning will unleash a new era of sociological theory and will finally enable the development of a qualitative computational science of society (Borch & Pardo-Guerra, 2024).
In the 19th century, statistics and sociology found joint origins in the new methodology of social physics. In the wake of social media, attempts were made to reinvent this tradition, with mixed success (Watts, 2016). More recently, "AI" has been welcomed as an important opportunity for the renewal of interpretative social science (Friese, 2023; Uitermark and Tonberg, 2024). Can the wide uptake of machine-learning based techniques across fields provide occasions to bring these debates and initiatives to maturity? Can we operationalise core questions and methodologies by combining social and computational theory and methods in new ways?
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