Content about social science

Is the $26 million invested in the XSEDE organization and its services a cost-effective way to deliver cyberinfrastructure services to the US open research community? Researchers took on this question at the recent XSEDE15 conference. 

The volume of video content has exploded in recent years, and museums and libraries face the daunting task of evaluating the condition of their collections to make preservation and access decisions. To meet this challenge, data curators, video engineers, supercomputing experts, and neuroscientists are testing and implementing quality assessment algorithms in supercomputers to rapidly identify levels of video quality in large collections.

Forecasting the extent of climate change must include social factors, researchers now say. Combining climate change with population growth and using 11 different computational simulations leads scientists to forecast a possible six-fold increase in extreme heat for residents of the southern US by 2070.

Part two of our free-wheeling conversation with the organizers of the Internet2 Gender Diversity Initiative.

Ethnic identification is fraught with difficulty, but political scientist Andy Harris has trained a supercomputer to extract group ethnicity from voter rosters in order to address social problems.

Turns out a list of names can tell you a lot about people — if you know how to look.

Part one of a free-wheeling conversation with organizers of the Internet2 Gender Diversity Initiative at the recent Internet2 Global Summit in Washington, DC.

Earthquake warning systems are an expensive proposition — but not when crowdsourced via smartphones. Scientists recently tested consumer devices, and were surprised at what they found.

In a TED talk video, Altimeter industry analyst Susan Etlinger discusses the ethical implications of collecting big data, and gives her perspective on how to best analyze data that both extracts real insights and builds trust.

iSGTW recently followed up with Etlinger on her proposed framework and how she believes we should approach traditional analytics methodologies to ensure they account for the variations and complexities of big data.

Austin is a booming city experiencing traffic woes commensurate with its expansion. To model and visualize solutions, city planners look to TACC to help corral the stampede of visitors.

With global data output growing rapidly, it is vital that researchers come together to build the social and technical bridges required to enable open sharing of research data. The organization charged with achieving this is the Research Data Alliance (RDA), which recently celebrated its first anniversary.

Last month, the RDA held a plenary meeting in Dublin, Ireland. The 497 attendees at the event engaged in discussion on a wide variety of topics, ranging from the role of publishers and persistent identifiers to heritage data and legal interoperability. Data applications discussed also included geospatial information, marine observation, food production, and urban quality of life indicators.