The Lecture Series on Contemporary World and China continued this month on 16 December with UIC Associate Vice President (Internationalization) and Dean of Division of Humanities and Social Sciences (DHSS), Prof Adrian Bailey as the speaker. Prof Bailey’s talk was entitled ‘Digital Social Science and the Development of the Greater Bay Area’.

Prof Bailey giving a lecture

Prof Bailey’s lecture discussed Digital Social Science (DSS) increasing the knowledge about the development of the Greater Bay Area as a globally significant social-technical system. He brought up the objectives of the lecture such as describing the fundamental ideas of DSS, summarise the use of DSS to understand smart region and quality of life, and the link between DSS and liberal arts education.

Prof Bailey highlighted areas about Traditional Social Sciences including human society and social relationships; as well as what it means to be a social being from the small scale of brain function to large system scale of demography, economy, politics, legal, environment, urban, communications, and culture.

Social practices, institutions, well-being, markets, quantitative and qualitative (positivist) inquiry are all apart of critical concepts, ideas, and approaches explained Prof Bailey. The lecture continued with Prof Bailey going into greater detail about the use of digital technologies in social science research such as big data and data analytics.

Prof Bailey explained how technological advancements have led to ‘Smart Cities’; this is when digital technology is part of daily life. Prof Bailey spoke about business-led urban development, creativity and service-led economy, priority investments in education and social capital, as well as planning for ecological and social sustainability.

At the end of the talk, there was a Q&A session where students eagerly asked about digital social science. Prof Bailey answered them confidently before the lecture came to an end.

From MPRO