SICSS Chile 2025: interdisciplinarity takes center stage

From January 21 to 29, the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science 2025 (SICSS) was held for the second time in Chile, with the aim of expanding knowledge in computational social sciences and promoting interdisciplinary participation among those working in these areas. 

For seven days, keynotes, workshops, and tutorials were held at the San Joaquín Campus of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, organized by Hernán Sarmiento, an engineer in the Innovation area of the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data. "This new SICSS has been a pleasant experience, especially because of the diversity of disciplines that participated. Something that we are sorely lacking in the fields of engineering and computing, and which is at the core of the IMFD, is to generate this interdisciplinarity around the study of data. Therefore, having such diverse areas as sociology, psychology, education, data scientists, among others, gave us a very encouraging opportunity to continue doing things both in Chile and throughout Latin America," says Sarmiento. 

Among the activities carried out, the workshops and keynotes introducing machine learning and natural language processing for social sciences and network analysis, among others, stood out. Participants then worked on group projects addressing topics such as education, news analysis, and thematic connections in the Chilean media field.

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 with very different interests participated. 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 the social sciences and data science, with the aim of generating cutting-edge research.

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