FGV hosts international event on computational social science
Students worked on interdisciplinary projects regarding COP 30, AI on YouTube and academic paper summaries, among other activities

Over the last two weeks, Fundação Getulio Vargas’ School of Communication, Media and Information (FGV ECMI) once again hosted the Brazilian edition of the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS Brazil). This year, the event featured a wide range of speakers, allowing for a greater exchange of knowledge and interdisciplinary collaboration between participants, researchers and professionals in the field.
SICSS Brazil 2024 was attended by undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of social science, communication, politics, art, law, computer science, statistics and related areas, as well as professionals working in these fields.
The aim of the two-week course is to provide not just practical workshops, but also reflections and theoretical possibilities for building projects. During the first week, the participants were immersed in a program of training sessions and conferences led by national and international experts. Topics such as research ethics in computational social science, digital data extraction and analysis, text analysis and image analysis were addressed. In the second week, the focus was on the practical application of the knowledge acquired in projects, carried out in groups and presented at the end of the training.
These projects reflected the interdisciplinary nature of the course students, covering topics such as discussion of COP 30 on Instagram, imagined apocalyptic narratives regarding artificial intelligence posted on YouTube, analysis of YouTube comments on indebtedness in Brazil, and the construction of a summary tool for scientific papers in Portuguese, using LLMs.
“Our final appraisal of SICSS Brazil 2024 is extremely positive. We received enthusiastic feedback from the participants, who highlighted the relevance and applicability of the content covered, as well as the unique opportunity to network with peers and experts in the field. This event has consolidated itself as a space for learning, innovation, building networks and strengthening the field of computational social science in Brazil,” says Danielle Sanches, a professor at FGV ECMI and a member of the SICSS Brazil organizing committee.
The speakers included professors Leonardo Nascimento, Davi Moreira, Elias Bitencourt and Jess Reia, and representatives of the market and civil society, such as Leandro Becker, editor-in-chief of Brazilian fact-checking organization Lupa, and Stephanie Jorge, co-founder of Torabit, a digital platform monitoring company. In addition, practical workshops on text analysis and image analysis were conducted by professors Lucas Roberto da Silva, Eurico Matos and Matheus Pestana of FGV ECMI.
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