SICSS Chile 2025: Interdisciplinarity Takes Center Stage

From January 21 to 29, the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science 2025 (SICSS) took place for the second time in Chile, with the goal of expanding knowledge in computational social sciences, promoting interdisciplinary participation among those belonging to these fields.

Over seven days, keynotes, workshops, and tutorials were held at the San Joaquín Campus of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, organized by Hernán Sarmiento, engineer in the Innovation area of the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data (IMFD). “This new edition of SICSS has been a wonderful experience, especially due to the diversity of disciplines that participated. Something that we lack quite a bit from the engineering and computing side, and which is at the core of IMFD’s foundations, is achieving this interdisciplinarity around the study of data, so having such diverse fields as sociology, psychology, education, data scientists, among others, gave us a very encouraging opportunity to see that more work can continue to be done both in Chile and at the Latin American level,” says Sarmiento.

Among the activities carried out, the workshops and keynotes on introduction to machine learning and natural language processing for social sciences, network analysis, among others, stood out, after which the participants worked on group projects addressing topics such as education, news analysis, and thematic connections in the Chilean media landscape.

For Pablo Beytía, part of the SICSS organizing team and academic at the UC Institute of Sociology, the event was “a very good opportunity where people from many different disciplines participated, with very different interests. The school allowed us to share and try to understand the new challenges of using digital tools in social settings”.

SICSS is an initiative of the Social Science Research Council, created to provide training to a new generation of researchers working at the intersection of social sciences and data science, with the goal of generating cutting-edge research.

This year, in addition to being organized by IMFD, SICSS also included the participation of the Faculty of Engineering of Universidad del Desarrollo, the UC Institute of Sociology, the National Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA), the Department of Computer Science of Universidad de Chile and the Computational Research in Social Science (CRiSS) Lab.