The Next Big [Social Science] Thing

“Dr. Gary King, NAS member and Professor at Harvard University, will talk about progress in and the future of the Social Sciences, illustrated with a wide range of examples from his research. These examples include forecasting the solvency of Social Security; reverse engineering Chinese censorship; estimating causes of death in developing countries; automated text analysis of billions of social media posts; dataverse, software and protocols his team developed to run the largest archive of social science research data; how humans are horrible at choosing keywords and what to do about it; and work in press embargoed until this talk. Dr. King is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University. He is based in the Department of Government and serves as Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He develops and applies empirical methods in many areas of social science research, focusing on innovations that span the range from statistical theory to practical application. His homepage can be found at GaryKing.org.”