SICSS Chile 2025: interdiscipline as a protagonist

From January 21-29, the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science 2025 (SICSS) was held for the second time in Chile, with the objective of broadening knowledge in computational social sciences, promoting interdisciplinary participation of those who belong to these areas. 

Keynotes, workshops and tutorials were held for seven days at the San Joaquín Campus of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, organized by Hernán Sarmiento, an engineer from the Innovation area of the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data. "This new SICSS has been a pleasant experience, especially for the diversity of disciplines that participated. Something that we lack a lot in the area of engineering and computing, and which is at the basis of the IMFD, is to generate this interdiscipline around the study of data, so having such diverse areas as sociology, psychology, education, data scientists, among others, gave us a super encouraging opportunity that we can continue doing things in Chile and Latin America", says Sarmiento. 

The activities included workshops and keynotes on introduction to machine learning and natural language processing for social sciences, network analysis, among others, so that participants could then work on group projects that addressed topics such as education, news analysis and thematic connections in the Chilean media field.

For Pablo Beytía, part of the SICSS organization team and academic of the UC Institute of Sociology, the event was "a very good instance 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 environments".

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 science and data science, with the goal of generating cutting-edge research.

This year SICSS was organized by the IMFD and also included the participation of the following institutions Faculty of Engineering of the Universidad del Desarrolloand the Institute of Sociology UCthe National Center for Artificial Intelligence (CENIA), the Department of Computer Science of the University of Chile, and the and the Computational Research in Social Science (CRiSS) Lab.