On December 29, the Second Computational Sociology Winter Forum was held at Harbin Engineering University. The forum was organized by the Special Committee on Computational Sociology of the Chinese Sociological Association and co-hosted by Harbin Engineering University and the editorial department of Research on Intelligent Society. The theme of the forum was “Frontiers of Computational Sociology in the Era of Large Models and Digital Social Governance.”

Yan Rujian, Vice President of the Harbin Engineering University, attended the forum and delivered a speech. Chen Yunsong, Deputy Secretary of the CPC Committee of Nanjing University, delivered a video address.

Yan Rujian welcomed the participating experts and scholars and introduced the university’s history and its distinctive educational focus. He noted that in recent years, the university has leveraged its strengths in sociology, computer science, and artificial intelligence to address the application demands of digital technologies in social governance. It has worked to establish an interdisciplinary hub integrating fundamental theoretical research, practical problem-solving, and innovation-driven entrepreneurship. Yan expressed hope that the forum would serve as an opportunity to explore the application prospects of large model technologies in the social sciences and to discuss building a fair, transparent, and efficient framework for digital social governance, effectively addressing the opportunities and challenges of intelligent social governance.

Chen Yunsong expressed his hope that experts and colleagues would engage in rich and efficient exchanges at the forum, exploring how to use big data and large models to investigate complex social realities and how advanced algorithms can enhance the efficiency and quality of social governance. He emphasized the importance of providing new ideas, methods, and solutions for digital social governance and infusing new vitality into the development of computational sociology.

Following the opening ceremony, six experts delivered keynote speeches. Bian Yanjie, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Xi’an Jiaotong University, Director of the Institute for Empirical Social Science 

Research, and tenured professor at the University of Minnesota, presented a report titled “Empirical Social Science Research in the Era of Big Data.”

Professor Liang Yucheng from the School of Anthropology and Sociology at Sun Yat-sen University delivered a keynote titled “Holistic Truth and Information Cocoons: A Study of Social Isolation Based on Large Models.”

Professor Hu Anning from the School of Social Development and Public Policy at Fudan University presented online on “Integration and Interaction Patterns of Family Members in Contemporary China.”

Professor Lv Peng from the School of Public Administration at Central South University gave a talk titled “Building Large-Scale Social Simulators and New Data Ecosystems: Big Data, Small Data, and Synthetic Data.”

Associate Professor Zheng Lu, Deputy Director of the Department of Sociology at the School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, presented on “Healthcare Inequality and the Rise of Online Medical Crowdfunding Platforms.”

Professor Liu Jiankun from the School of Humanities at Harbin Engineering University delivered a report on “National Image Communication and Construction.”

The forum received over 120 submissions, with 50 papers selected for presentation. Seven parallel sessions were organized, focusing on topics such as “Generative Artificial Intelligence and Digital Society,” “Advances in Agent-Based Simulation Research,” “Legal Document Mining and Applications,” “Computation and Knowledge Production,” “Computational Urban Complexity,” “Data Mining and Governance in the Intelligent Era,” and “Social Networks and Group Dynamics.” Experts and scholars engaged in in-depth discussions on these topics, promoting interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation, and offering insights for the development of computational sociology.