Big Data, Big Ambition for Behavioral & Social Sciences Research

Why do criminals do what they do? How do local community choices affect Earth’s environment? What moves people to protest for changes in the way they’re governed?

The questions that behavioral and social scientists tackle are as fascinating and complex as ever, but the tools at their disposal are undergoing a technological revolution, says Gregory F. Ball, who’s wrapping up his first year as dean of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences (BSOS), one of the university’s largest academic divisions.

“We have age-old questions, and we need to be attacking them in novel ways,” says Ball, a prominent behavioral biologist who previously served as vice dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University.

One of his key priorities for the college is helping his faculty fully exploit challenging yet promising new computational research methods.

An emerging methodology that’s already changing BSOS, he says, is big data analytics, which is giving researchers a handle on chaotic masses of information that would have been impossible to analyze in earlier eras.

“We can look at large aggregates of data in novel ways to try to understand social trends on a much bigger spectrum than was possible before,” Ball says. “Right now, big data techniques applied to the social sciences is considered cutting edge, but in less than one generation it’s going to be routine.”

Ball says he and Eric Denna, UMD’s vice president for information technology and chief information officer, have had productive strategy sessions about how to provide advanced computational support for BSOS researchers.

“He completely gets it, that big data analysis is going to be extremely important for my college,” Ball says.

Within BSOS, the Department of Geographical Sciences is helping lead the way in the analysis of large data sets with its groundbreaking work in geospatial-information science and remote sensing. Among other discoveries, researchers from the department recently demonstrated that contrary to widespread belief, tropical deforestation is picking up steam.

“They are taking images of the entire planet from space, taking geography to a whole new level of analysis,” Ball says.

And BSOS researchers in behavior and psychology are applying advanced methods to the study of human behavior by using brain imaging technology at the Maryland Neuroimaging Center, a multicollege facility led by BSOS.

“We have people looking at behavior and cognition, and imaging brain activity in relation to that to try and understand the relationship” as well as answer other questions facing BSOS social science researchers, he says.

All this points in the same direction—BSOS is becoming known as a critical player in key interdisciplinary research areas at UMD including cybersecurity, language sciences, neurosciences and national defense work. “Our links to other colleges at UMD are becoming stronger and stronger,” he says. “They’ll continue to strengthen as our faculty work collaboratively to tackle the most important problems facing society today.”

Reprinted with permission from Research at Maryland, a publication of the Division of Research.

Published on Mon, May 18, 2015 - 3:20PM