Empowering Social Science to Understand and Ameliorate Major Challenges of Human Society (Federal Interagency Conference on Social Science and Big Data)

Social scientists can understand and ameliorate some of the major challenges of human society by making new connections across academia, government, and industry; developing new methods of analyzing data, rather than merely watching big data get bigger; and ensuring they have the flexibility to ask new questions that arise in data analysis rather than sticking to the original ones posed. I make these points in discussions of research projects I’ve been lucky to lead across the US, China, Mexico, and Italy.