The Computational Social Sciences (CSS) group is built around researchers interested in understanding social phenomena through new data sources and computational methods.
Based within the Economics and Sociology Department of the Institut Polytechnique de Paris, the group brings together scholars from various disciplines – sociology, economics, statistics, and computer science, in particular.
A Broad Research Agenda at the Intersection of Data and Society
The work of the CSS group covers a wide range of topics linked to the digital transformation of societies. Its members study how new technologies reshape social processes, how the growing availability of data influences everyday life, and how digital infrastructures are designed, maintained and used. At the same time, they develop and apply new methods in order to make the most of the current data abundance.
This dual focus, substantive social questions on the one hand, methodological innovations on the other, lies at the heart of the group’s approach.
Training, Seminars, and Scientific Activities
The CSS group is also deeply involved in training and scientific exchange. It organizes the seminar series “AI for Social Sciences”, which regularly host international speakers working on the uses of artificial intelligence and machine learning in social research. The team also contributes to the organization of the international summer school “The Summer Institutes in Computational Social Sciences (SICSS)”, helping to train students and researchers in computational methods.
In addition, the group regularly takes part in the organization of scientific conferences and offers opportunities for young researchers through PhD grants, internships and research assistant positions.
Information about these activities, as well as news and resources, is available on the CSS website.
Open Science: A New Set of Tutorials
An important part of the CSS mission is to make methods accessible to the wider research community. The group regularly publishes tutorials designed to help researchers work with new tools and data. They recently released a new set, and reorganized the page to facilitate discovery.
Their latest tutorial, “The General Inquirer in the Time of LLMs: a BERTopic tutorial”, focuses on a common task in social science research: identifying and structuring the main themes in a collection of documents. How can we understand what a corpus is about? How similar are the documents? Which topics are most central?
Using the BERTopic framework, the tutorial introduces the main principles of topic modeling and shows how these methods can be applied in a social science project, in the context of recent developments in large language models and text analysis.
The tutorial is available here.
Looking Ahead: a New Master’s Program in Computational Social Science
Starting in September 2025, the CSS group significantly contributes to a new Master’s Program in Computational Social Science at the Institut Polytechnique de Paris. Taught entirely in English, the program offers advanced courses in statistical and computational methods, with a strong emphasis on applied research and skills that are valuable both in academia and beyond.
Through its research, training activities and open resources, the CSS group aims to provide a space for reflection and experimentation on how social sciences can engage with the digital transformation of societies.