Computational Summer school on Modeling Social and collective behavior (COSMOS) 2025

General Info

We invite you to apply to the 3rd Computational Summer school on Modeling Social and collective behavior (COSMOS) taking place from September 29th - October 3rd in Tokyo, Japan.

COSMOS is designed to provide attendees (COSMOnauts) from diverse fields (e.g., psychology, economics, neuroscience, biology, computer science, etc…) and career stages (master, PhD, postdoc, and junior PI) with the computational skills required to tackle emerging challenges in understanding social learning and collective behaviour.

More Details

The Computational Summer school on Modeling Social and collective behavior (COSMOS) is designed to provide attendees (COSMOnauts) from diverse fields (e.g., psychology, economics, neuroscience, biology, computer science, etc…) and career stages (master, PhD, postdoc, and junior PI) with the computational skills required to tackle emerging challenges in understanding social learning and collective behaviour. Taking advantage of the close collaboration networks and interdisciplinary expertise available at the RIKEN CBS, COSMOS will invite leading researchers from diverse disciplines as guest instructors who will mentor attendees’ own modelling projects during the School. In addition to providing hands-on instruction and mentorship for in-person attendees, the openly accessible teaching materials) and recorded talks are designed to reach an even larger audience. The goal of the summer school is to help students develop a foundational understanding about how computational modeling can be a strong thread that unifies and advances the study of a wide range of social and collective phenomena.

Today, we live in a massively interconnected and digitalized society that allows us to rapidly exchange information among huge numbers of genetically unrelated individuals. This level of connectivity is made possible by our capacity for integrating socially acquired information with our individual experiences in order to inform our reasoning and decision-making processes. Human social learning and our capacity for cumulatively innovating upon past solutions thus plays a central role in our ability to thrive in a wide range of environmental conditions. Yet, in addition to the benefits, there are also emerging dangers and pitfalls of social learning mechanisms gone awry, such as the spread of misinformation and formation of echo-chambers, which are phenomena we are only beginning to understand.

While human social learning is certainly distinct, there has also been a long-standing tradition of researchers studying collective behavior in non-human animals, with their own sophisticated vocabulary of theories and powerful predictive models. Yet, superficial gaps in terminologies and concepts used across human and non-human domains have made cross-disciplinary collaborations difficult. To better understand ourselves as human social learners, what is required is a unified language that allows us to engage in the quantitative and comparative study of social learning and collective intelligence observed across species.

To address this gap, we propose a summer school dedicated to developing the skills needed to communicate with researchers of social and collective behavior from diverse fields, using computational models as a common language. Computational modeling is becoming both more important and widely used in behavioural sciences. However, the mathematical framework and computational skills necessary to tackle the interdisciplinary challenges of modeling collective behaviour are not always readily accessible to early career researchers.

For our third iteration in 2025, we have invited an exciting new line-up of speakers across a diverse spectrum of approaches for modeling social and collective behavior in humans and animals. In relocating to Tokyo for 2025, we have prioritized inviting leading researchers in Asia and Australia. A keynote talk will be given by Tatsuya Kameda (Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Informatics, Meiji Gakuin University), followed by six thematic lectures by Lusha Zhu (Peking University), Lucy Aplin (Uni Zürich/Australian National University), Damien Farine (Australian National University/Uni Zürich/MPI Animal Behavior), Shinsuke Suzuki (Hitotsubashi Uni), Mayuko Nakamaru (Institute of Science Tokyo), Bill D. Thompson (UC Berkeley), and Lio Wong (Stanford).

At the start of the summer school, students will give short poster presentations, during which they present their current work and receive feedback. Additionally, all participants will be matched with a faculty member as a mentor, where mentorship sessions provide opportunities for hands-on feedback. Returning again in 2025, are hands-on project work sessions that will provide participants with the opportunity to directly apply the skills that they have learned under the close supervision of instructors, using a number of prepared projects with open source data and code.

Application

COSMOS is targeted towards attendees from diverse fields (e.g., psychology, economics, neuroscience, biology, computer science, etc) and career stages (masters, PhD, postdoc, and junior PI).

Participants should have a basic background knowledge in elementary statistics (e.g., probability theory) and programming in R in order to master the technical skills, but no prior experience with computational modeling is necessary.

Attendees will benefit from tutorials teaching the fundamentals of computational modeling in social and cultural settings, attend talks by leading researchers from around the world, and gain career advice during mentorship sessions. Returning in 2025 we will also have group projects, where participants can directly apply their new knowledge on a number of provided dataset under the supervision of our instructors.

COSMOS 2025 is free to attend, and 20 successful applications will be provided with free accomodations. In addition, we will provide travel stipends for a small number of attendees on the basis of merit and need.

To apply, you will need to submit the following materials by April 25th:

1. One page cover letter describing your motivation to attend the summer school and how you think it will inform your research
2. Curriculum Vitae (CV)
3. One letter of recommendation

You can submit your application (cover letter + CV combined in a single PDF) on the application portal until April 25th (last timezone on Earth).

Please instruct your letter writer to submit a letter of recommendation as a pdf, also before April 25th. Please ensure your letter writer enters your name the same as in your own application.

Source and application: https://cosmossummerschool.github.io/