This week we got the chance to welcome Thomas Hills (University of Warwick) back to his old workplace at the psychology department of the University of Basel. Thomas was not only visiting for nostalgic reasons, but also to teach our PhD students about the possibilities and challenges of working with big data.

More concretely, the aim of Thomas’ workshop was to provide PhD students with an understanding of how data science is applied to large data sets (‘big data’) to make data-driven decisions and to answer theoretical questions about human behavior. The course mainly focused on how to derive psychological inferences from natural language, across domains such as culturomics, memory, wellbeing, and language across the lifespan.

We would like to thank Thomas for this excellent introduction to big data and language and hope to be able to welcome him back to Basel soon again.