We are pleased to announce that the forthcoming Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS) will be held in Istanbul, sponsored by Ozyegin University with co-support from Koc, Sabanci, and Bogazici Universities.

Koç University, as a leading Research University in Turkey and a center of excellence, hosted 21 out of 37 ERC projects awarded to Turkish universities. Out of these 21 grants, 14 are on engineering topics (electrical and electronics, chemical and biological, computer, mechanical), 5 on social sciences and humanities (sociology, history, economics), and 2 are in the field of molecular biology and genetics.

Dr. Erdem Yörük’s project, titled “Politus: AI-based Data Platform for Fair Social Policies”, received the European Research Council (ERC) 2022 Proof of Concept (PoC) Grant and has been awarded with €150K grant! This is the first ERC Proof of Concept (PoC) project received in Turkey in the field of Social Sciences. PoC is given for additional studies that will confirm the commercial/socio-economic potential of the projects and contribute to the commercialization of their ideas, in addition to the ERC funds of the lead researchers previously supported by the ERC. The Politus Project will assess the commercial viability of proprietary natural language processing and machine learning technology for AI-based data-driven fair social policymaking. The project will verify the innovation potential of computational social science and policy-related novel methods from Erdem Yörük’s ERC-funded Emerging Welfare Project.