Big Data Mining and Complexity

In addition to being a Professor of Sociology at Durham University, I am currently Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry (Northeast Ohio Medical University), Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute for Health and Wellbeing, and Co-Editor of the Routledge Complexity in Social Science series. I am also a member of the editorial board for International Journal of Social Research Methodology and Complexity, Governance and Networks. Trained as a sociologist, clinical psychologist and methodologist (statistics and computational social science), I have spent the past ten years developing a new case-based, data-mining approach to modeling complex social systems - called the SACS Toolkit - which my colleagues and I have used to help researchers, policy makers and service providers address and improve complex public health issues such as community health and well-being; infrastructure and grid reliability; mental health and inequality; big data and data mining; and globalization and global civil society.  We have also recently developed the COMPLEX-IT R-studio software app, which allows everyday users seamless access to such high-powered techniques as machine intelligence, neural nets, and agent-based modeling to make better sense of the complex world(s) in which they live and work.