On the afternoon of November 15, 2015, the 42 session of SUSTC Lecture kicked off at the lecture hall of the library. Li Xiaoming, president assistant of Peking University (PKU) and a professor at the Department of Computer Science & Technology, PKU, made an impressive presentation on Computational Thinking in Social Sciences. Han Wei, deputy director of the Preparatory Office of South University of Science and Technology of China (SUSTC) listened to the presentation along with over 100 teachers and students.

“Observing and analyzing economic and social phenomena with computational thinking will make us love sciences and life more,” said Li. The presentation was actually based on Method of Computational Thinking in Social Sciences, a general course run by him at PKU. With obvious interdisciplinary nature, the course is practical and interesting. He expected to share it with more people. He divided the presentation into four parts: gaming in the network, balance in the relational structure, confusion in voting, and computing in the matching market, dissecting the phenomena and applications of computational thinking in social sciences. Based on common problems in daily life, such as vehicle congestion, job choice, social relations, voting and goods trade, he introduced the applications of computational thinking in social sciences in simple terms, and interacted with the teachers and students present.

Li Xiaoming invited students to the stage for a test

Over the past decade, Li has researched on the processing of mass Internet information, and advocated the integration of information technology with social sciences. He has led the construction of “China Web Information Museum” and the development of “Tianwang Search”, the most influential search engine among domestic universities and technologies, published Search Engine: Principle, Technology and System, one of China’s earliest search engine monographs and The Laws of the Web, a translated book. He visited SUSTC this time for the “Expert Consulting Conference on International Higher Education Innovation Center” organized by SUSTC. At the conference, he made a presentation entitled What Innovations Do We Need When MOOCs Are Becoming Increasing Mature?

Students spoke up enthusiastically amid a warm atmosphere