On October 19, 2022, the second Social Sciences for the Digital and Globalised World guest lecture titled “Computational Social Science Research” organized by the Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, was held at T5-501. Teachers and students of relevant disciplines actively participated in the lecture and enthusiastically communicated with the speaker. More than 100 people attended the lecture either online or offline.

The speaker, Professor Peng Lv, is a professor of the School of Public Administration and the School of Automation at Central South University. He is also the director of Social Computing Research Centre at the same institution. Prof. Lv received his joint Ph.D. from the School of Social Sciences at Tsinghua University and the University of Chicago, USA, and was a postdoctoral researcher of the Department of Automation at Tsinghua. He has been selected as a “special researcher” of the Cyberspace Administration of China. He has also been named Young Chang Jiang Scholar by the Ministry of Education, China.

Professor Lv’s lecture introduced recent developments of the computational social science research. He proposes that social organisms are complex social systems, and that computational social science research has the advantages of being intelligent, systematic, and evolutionary. As a result, Professor Lv’s study is developed primarily along two interdisciplinary lines of thought. On the one hand, research paradigms of natural sciences are applied to the computer modeling of human group behaviours and human network group behaviours. On the other hand, at the level of social systems, the two-way interaction of social organism simulation and social governance study enables the organic fusion of social and natural science disciplines.

Drawing on his recent projects and publications, Professor Lv then discussed the outline of the overall ambitious disciplinary construction of the computational social science. The outline consists of seven main areas, including the complexity analysis of group behaviour mechanism, group behaviour life cycle model, online group behaviour life cycle model algorithm, online group behaviour life cycle micro-level agent-based modelling (ABM), group behaviour model and social public safety dynamics, group behaviour model and national development rise and fall dynamics; and group behaviour modelling and intelligent social governance research.

After the lecture, Professor Lv answered several questions from the audience and provided useful advice to students interested in digital social science studies. Dr. Qiaoyun Zhang of the Digital Social Science program monitored the lecture.