About Us

The twenty-first century has produced an abundance of digital data and a parallel revolution in the tools available to make sense of it. This convergence has given rise to computational social science-an interdisciplinary field combining computational tools and techniques with social science theories and methods to understand human behaviour.

The Computational Social Science Lab at the City University of Hong Kong was founded to bring this agenda to Asia and to connect it with global scholarship. We combine the social scientist's concern with explanation and causal inference, the data scientist's strength in prediction and large-scale measurement, and the experimentalist's commitment to rigorous design. Our research is use-inspired: motivated by consequential problems in governance, communication, society, and technology, rather than by any single method or discipline.

Our members draw on expertise in network analysis, natural language processing, machine learning, survey and experimental methods, causal inference, and comparative political analysis. By integrating these capabilities, the Lab produces research that is both scientifically rigorous and relevant to policymakers, platforms, and the public.

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