Episode 103: Willem Zents (https://www.linkedin.com/in/willemzents and https://wbhz.github.io) is an MSc Candidate in Social Data Science at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. He's interested in applying data science techniques to better understand how humans behave in an increasingly complex, digital world. In particular, his work focuses how technology shapes economic life. Willem graduated from LUC's GED major in 2019.

Weapons of Math Destruction (DZ's review):

http://www.kysq.org/aguanomics/2017/02/weapons-of-math-destruction-the-review

The A-Z of AI developed by my department and Google: https://atozofai.withgoogle.com/intl/en-US/

On the need for social data science: https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/blog/why-social-data-science-matters-to-societal-resilience/

On Google Flu Trends: https://www.wired.com/2015/10/can-learn-epic-failure-google-flu-trends/

Classic social data science for economic development example: http://sustain.stanford.edu/predicting-poverty

Cool talk on countering COVID misinformation on closed platforms like Whatsapp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlWM5oksrSE

On why social science matters more than ever in the age of big data:

https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1512&context=asc_papers

Sociological perspective on big data: https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780198843498.001.0001/oso-9780198843498-chapter-11