The Computational Research Lab (CSR lab) originated from a joint initiative taken by an interdisciplinary group of researchers at the Department of Legal and Social Sciences of the G. d’Annunzio University, Chieti-Pescara.

Computational social research draws on a set of disciplines, having between them access to enormous quantities of Big Data, in order to analyse human interaction and from this analysis derive qualitatively new perspectives on collective behaviour, using an interdisciplinary approach comprising sociology, psychology, law, economics, mathematics, statistics, theoretical physics, and IT. The elements of computational social research are: Big Data; analysis of digital trails left by online activity; scientific theories of network analysis; social simulations created by means of computational modelling.