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Advances in data-driven computational social sciences

The increasing availability of large datasets about social dynamics has introduced a paradigm shift in the study of social phenomena towards a data-driven approach. The International Conference on Computational Social Science (ICCSS 2015), held in Helsinki, Finland, from June 8-11, 2015, was the first global event featuring this new type of study, which has established itself at the interface between physical, computer and social sciences. This special issue is a collection of some of the best original contributions presented at the conference. Topics include information sharing, energy consumption, mood propagation through social media, fact checking, homophily, impact dynamics, human mobility, and segregation.

Edited by: Fosca Giannotti, Santo Fortunato, Michael Macy


  1. Gender homophily, or the preference for interaction with individuals of the same gender, has been observed in many contexts, especially during childhood and adolescence. In this study we investigate such pheno...

    Authors: David Laniado, Yana Volkovich, Karolin Kappler and Andreas Kaltenbrunner
    Citation: EPJ Data Science 2016 5:19
  2. Participation in social sensing applications is challenged by privacy threats. Large-scale access to citizens’ data allow surveillance and discriminatory actions that may result in segregation phenomena in soc...

    Authors: Evangelos Pournaras, Jovan Nikolic, Pablo Velásquez, Marcello Trovati, Nik Bessis and Dirk Helbing
    Citation: EPJ Data Science 2016 5:14
  3. Energy efficiency is a key challenge for building sustainable societies. Due to growing populations, increasing incomes and the industrialization of developing countries, the world primary energy consumption i...

    Authors: Andrey Bogomolov, Bruno Lepri, Roberto Larcher, Fabrizio Antonelli, Fabio Pianesi and Alex Pentland
    Citation: EPJ Data Science 2016 5:13
  4. Tourism is becoming a significant contributor to medium and long range travels in an increasingly globalized world. Leisure traveling has an important impact on the local and global economy as well as on the e...

    Authors: Aleix Bassolas, Maxime Lenormand, Antònia Tugores, Bruno Gonçalves and José J Ramasco
    Citation: EPJ Data Science 2016 5:12

    The Erratum to this article has been published in EPJ Data Science 2016 5:16

  5. We detect the backbone of the weighted bipartite network of the Japanese credit market relationships. The backbone is detected by adapting a general method used in the investigation of weighted networks. With ...

    Authors: Luca Marotta, Salvatore Miccichè, Yoshi Fujiwara, Hiroshi Iyetomi, Hideaki Aoyama, Mauro Gallegati and Rosario N Mantegna
    Citation: EPJ Data Science 2016 5:10
  6. We consider inventions as novel combinations of existing technological capabilities. Patent data allow us to explicitly identify such combinatorial processes in invention activities (Youn et al. in J R Soc Interf...

    Authors: Daniel Kim, Daniel Burkhardt Cerigo, Hawoong Jeong and Hyejin Youn
    Citation: EPJ Data Science 2016 5:8
  7. Citation networks have been widely used to study the evolution of science through the lenses of the underlying patterns of knowledge flows among academic papers, authors, research sub-fields, and scientific jo...

    Authors: Valerio Ciotti, Moreno Bonaventura, Vincenzo Nicosia, Pietro Panzarasa and Vito Latora
    Citation: EPJ Data Science 2016 5:7
  8. Contributing to the writing of history has never been as easy as it is today thanks to Wikipedia, a community-created encyclopedia that aims to document the world’s knowledge from a neutral point of view. Thou...

    Authors: Claudia Wagner, Eduardo Graells-Garrido, David Garcia and Filippo Menczer
    Citation: EPJ Data Science 2016 5:5
  9. Segregation is widespread in all realms of human society. Several influential studies have argued that intolerance is not a prerequisite for a segregated society, and that segregation can arise even when peopl...

    Authors: Milena Tsvetkova, Olof Nilsson, Camilla Öhman, Lovisa Sumpter and David Sumpter
    Citation: EPJ Data Science 2016 5:4
  10. The exploration of people’s everyday life has long been of interest to social scientists. Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in analyzing human behavioral data generated by technology (e.g. mobile ...

    Authors: Simone Centellegher, Marco De Nadai, Michele Caraviello, Chiara Leonardi, Michele Vescovi, Yusi Ramadian, Nuria Oliver, Fabio Pianesi, Alex Pentland, Fabrizio Antonelli and Bruno Lepri
    Citation: EPJ Data Science 2016 5:3