Research on approaches for computer analysis of human behaviour at different scales.

The Social and Affective Computing group at the Department on Information and Computing Sciences of the Faculty of Science develops approaches for computer analysis of human behaviour at different scales. At the largest scale, social computing involves pattern recognition and machine learning based methods applied to digital breadcrumbs left behind humans, to answer questions originally posed by social scientists, and involves interdisciplinary collaborations.

More about current projects

Led by Prof. Albert Ali Salah, the group is participating in three European projects relevant to Migration and Societal Change at the moment: The HumMingBird Project investigates the use of big data sources to address data gaps in migration research, and UU leads the work package on using mobile phone data (with PhD researcher Bilgeçağ Aydoğdu), collaborating with a telecommunications operator to analyze mobile call detail records from millions of customers in an aggregated and privacy-aware fashion to develop indicators for migration. The SoBigData ESFRI Preparatory Phase Project is a research infrastructure to share data and tools in social sciences, with human migration and mobility as a major case study. Finally, RAISE is a project that will start in 2023, and will use social media analysis (among other approaches) to look at racism and xenophobia in precarious contexts. Local initiatives include the "Co-designing a fair digital asylum procedure" project at UU. The group also collaborates with IOM Mongolia and the National Statistics Office of Mongolia to build capacity in mobile phone analysis for internal migration indicators.

A recent book entitled Data Science for Migration and Mobility, co-edited by Prof. Salah, is published in November 2022 by Oxford Univ. Press in the British Academy series.