Tom Emery speaks with Chris Bail, Professor of Sociology, Computer Science, Political Science, and Public Policy at Duke University and co-founder of SICSS (the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science). Nearly ten years on, Chris reflects on how SICSS grew from a single location to more than 50 worldwide, and the community that made it possible. He also explains why the part of the courses in which participants develop their own projects is the heart of the programme: a space where experimentation, and even failure, is part of learning. And with AI reshaping both education and the social sciences, Chris draws on the lessons of COVID-era adaptation to ask what it means to teach in the age of LLMs.

Affiliations: 

• Dr. Chris Bail, Professor of Sociology, Computer Science, Political Science, and Public Policy at Duke University; Co-founder of the Summer Institutes in Computational Social Sciences
• Dr. Tom Emery - Executive Director of ODISSEI, the Dutch National Infrastructure for Social Science; Associate Professor, Department of Public Administration and Sociology of Erasmus University, Rotterdam

Useful links: 
https://sicss.io/apply#faq
https://sicss.io/overview
https://github.com/compsocialscience/summer-institute
https://sicss.io/tom