From 22 June to 3 July, 2026, the ARDC-supported Australian Internet Observatory (AIO) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society (ADM+S) will host a Summer (or Australian Winter) Institute in Computational Social Science at SICSS-Melbourne.
For this 2-week intensive program, PhD candidates and early career researchers will explore innovative techniques that bring computational methodologies and the social sciences together to study our societies and discover new solutions to make them better.
The program will involve a number of workshops and lectures, group activities, and participant-led research projects that will propose solutions to existing, practical problems developed by our academic and industry experts. We will use an arsenal of cutting-edge tools for digital platform data collection and analysis, discuss them in the context of more traditional social science research, and explore what combining them actually means.
Participants will have the chance to learn about the following topics (and beyond):
There will be numerous opportunities for participants to talk about their research with senior colleagues, organisers, visiting speakers, and others in the cohort. All created materials and topics covered will be released as open-source resources, and participants will be able to incorporate them into their own projects or work with them in the future.
Applications closed on11 May 2026.
Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS), founded in 2017, is a global initiative designed to bring together social scientists and scientists from computational research fields. Its main mission is to democratise access to computational training and build a network of interdisciplinary researchers. By participating in a local institute, you don’t just learn new skills, but also join a community dedicated to open, reproducible, and innovative research.
PhD candidates and early career researchers (ECRs) / postdocs from any institution in Australia were invited to apply. However, we do not limit participation exclusively to academics and welcome applications from other relevant areas. All backgrounds and fields of study will be considered, as this interdisciplinary environment is a core component of the program. Approximately 20 participants will be accepted.
Since it is, first and foremost, a learning opportunity, some materials will be provided in advance and remain available during and after the program. That is, participants with less experience in social science research will be expected to complete additional readings in advance of the Institute, and participants with less experience coding will be expected to complete the SICSS boot camp.
If you have any questions, please reach out to [email protected].
Acknowledgment
The Australian Internet Observatory (https://doi.org/10.25956/twvn-ca19) is a co-investment partnership with RMIT University, QUT, University of Queensland, University of Melbourne, Swinburne University, Deakin University and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) through the HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons (DOI:10.3565/hjrp-b141). The ARDC is enabled by the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).
