Dr. Scott A. Hale
- Positions: Researcher.
- Departments: Oxford Internet Institute.
Dr. Scott A. Hale is a Faculty Fellow with expertise spanning the social and computational sciences. His research focuses on knowledge discovery, data mining, and the visualization of human behaviour in three substantive areas: multilingualism and user experience, mobilization/collective action, and human mobility.
As digital technologies, mobile phones, the Internet, and social media become increasingly integrated into our lives, unprecedented quantities of digital trace data about human behaviour are being generated. This data provides opportunities to study complex social systems in frameworks similar to those of the natural sciences with emphasis on empirical observation of patterns in large-scale data, quantitative modelling, and experiments. Such approaches—forming a new area of computational social science or social data science—can generate theory-informed predictive models and change the way we understand and solve social problems. However, the vast majority of the data about human behaviour is unstructured, and new tools must be developed in order to take full advantage of these new data. Scott’s research focuses on developing new tools as well as applying the latest tools developed by others to the study of human behaviour.
