学生对 加州大学戴维斯分校 提供的 Computational Social Science Capstone Project 的评价和反馈

A very interesting and well designed course to begin with while setting on the journey of computational social science. Hands-on labs / assignments gave sufficient exposure as well as skill building experience on various softwares and techniques.

If the theory, methods, and tools (the ones used or similar tools) are new to you, you will most likely love the specialization and the capstone. If you are familiar with parts of the theory or some of the methods and tools the specialization still offers a broad overview of the field and some interesting insights.

For the latter group (those who have some experience in the field of computational social science) the capstone might feel a bit redundant. You can do the 4 assignments in 10 to 20 minutes (because they are basically replicas of the peer-review assignments of the previous 4 courses of the specialization and very simple). You will then wait for days or weeks for peer reviews. That was a rather frustrating experience of an otherwise good specialization.

Well done to Prof. Hilbert for putting together a wonderful course. One thing I found is how hard it is to counter fake news from the artificial simulations. Shows how true the old saying is, when a lie (or advertisement) is repeated enough times, people start to believe it. That is the power of the media.

I am keen to explore the potential of these tools further.

One potential drawback is the stereo typing of individuals based on big data personality assessment. People can change overtime and not only that, the use of language can alter too. So the assumptions underlying the construction of natural language assessment may need to be reviewed to stay relevant.

Do I now have experience with computational science? Yeah I believe I do. Thank you very much.

Dr. Hilbert is a fantastic lecturer and educator! I sincerely hope he continues developing and delivering new courses like this in coming days. The specialization opened up worlds of new ideas to me. Highly recommended!

What a great way of integrating all we learned throughout the specialization!