About the Lab
Understanding society in the digital age — through data, computation, and experiment.
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 (CSSL) 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.
History
The Lab traces its origins to the Political Analysis Lab, established in 2016. In 2025, it was revamped and renamed the Computational Social Science Lab (CSSL) to reflect its members' evolving research agenda in the digital age, broadening its scope from political analysis to the full breadth of computational social science.
Our Approach
We are deliberately multidisciplinary and multi-method. We believe the most important questions about the digital age cannot be answered from within a single discipline, and that the strongest findings emerge when description, explanation, and prediction are brought into dialogue. The Lab functions as shared infrastructure, including physical space, computing resources, data pipelines, and a collaborative community that enables members and partners to pursue ambitious, team-based research.
Research Collaborations
The CSSL works in close partnership with leading institutions in Hong Kong and worldwide.
International partners
- Oxford Internet Institute (OII) and the Talking to Machines Initiative (TMI), University of Oxford — social data science, computing and society, and human–machine communication.
- Institute for Digital Government and Governance, Tsinghua University — digital-era governance and public policy.
- Institute for Global Cooperation and Understanding (iGCU), Peking University — global governance and state–society relations.
- World Values Survey (WVS), Asian Barometer Survey (ABS), and the V-Dem Institute — cross-national data on values, opinion, and well-being.
CityU departments
The Lab draws core members from the Departments of Public and International Affairs (PIA), Social and Behavioural Sciences (SS), Media and Communication (COM), and Decision Analytics and Operations (DAO).
Mission
To advance the frontier of computational social science in Asia; to generate rigorous, replicable, and policy-relevant knowledge about the digital transformation of society; and to train a new generation of scholars fluent in both social theory and quantitative methods.