One thing we do here at the Applied Statistics Center is hold mini-conferences. The next one looks really cool. It’s organized by Sharad Goel and Jake Hofman (Microsoft Research, formerly at Yahoo Research), David Park (Columbia University), and Sergei Vassilvitskii (Google). As with our other conferences, one of our goals is to mix the academic and nonacademic research communities.

Here’s the website for the workshop, and here’s the announcement from the organizers:

With an explosion of data on every aspect of our everyday existence — from what we buy, to where we travel, to who we know — we are able to observe human behavior with granularity largely thought impossible just a decade ago. The growth of such online activity has further facilitated the design of web-based experiments, enhancing both the scale and efficiency of traditional methods. Together these advances have created an unprecedented opportunity to address longstanding questions in the social sciences, ranging from sociology to political science to economics and beyond. The inaugural 2012 workshop on Computational and Online Social Science (CAOSS) aims to bring together diverse research communities that work at the intersection of computer science and social sciences to build a lasting foundation for this emerging discipline.

The program features invited speakers Sinan Aral (NYU), David Jensen (UMass), Jure Leskovec (Stanford), David Reiley (Google), and Duncan Watts (Microsoft).

Call for Participation. As space is limited, we ask that you please complete the free registration form at http://caossnyc.org/registration if you plan to attend. Additionally, if you would like to present your work as a short talk or poster, please submit an abstract when registering. Submissions will be accepted through September 14th and funding is available for student presenters.

We encourage you to pass this information on to others who may be interested. Please contact us at [email protected] if you have any additional questions.

CAOSS is made possible by the generous support of Microsoft Research, eBay Research, Facebook, Google, the Applied Statistics Center at Columbia University, ACM SIGecom, and Johnson Research Lab.

Ebay research, huh? I didn’t know about that one . . .

P.S. Now that these guys don’t work there anymore, I don’t think I have to call it Yahoo!!