We attended the 3rd GESIS Computational Social Science Winter Symposium 2016 in Cologne, which brought a diverse group of researchers from computer science and mathematics (39% of attendees), sociology (27%), political sciences (11%) and other disciplines together to discuss and cross-fertilize each other's research.
A highlight of an overall exciting conference was Helen Margetts' (University of Oxford) presentation on her work on turbulent politics. Tina Eliassi-Rad from Northeastern University gave a great keynote on the effectiveness of roles in network analysis. Noshir Contractor, also from Northwestern University, showed how computational social science can help us address grand societal challenges, e.g. by studying what team dynamics are important for NASA to bring humans to mars.
A very innovative aspect about the Winter Symposium was that every poster was accompanied by a two-minute presentation, which enabled everybody to get a great overview of the interdisciplinary research in computational social science.
For anybody interested in computational social science, we can recommend the cssnet mailing list.
The next Computational Social Science Winter Symposium in 2017 will take place in London, UK, with a special focus on Inequality and Imbalances. In 2017, the 3rd International Conference on Computational Social Science will come to Cologne.