We welcome David Garcia at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna

We welcome David Garcia at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna

Starting in September 2017, David Garcia will be joining the Hub as a Medical University of Vienna group leader to build a research group funded by WWTF (Vienna Research Groups for Young Investigators Call). In his research David will yield his experience in social psychology and advanced computer science, including information retrieval, big data computing, and machine learning. David holds computer science degrees from Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Spain) and ETH Zurich (Switzerland) and did a PhD and Postdoc at ETH Zurich, working at the Chair of Systems Design.

His research focuses on computational social science, designing models and analysing human behaviour through digital traces. His main work revolves around the topics of emotions, cultures, and political polarization, combining statistical analyses of large datasets of online interaction with agent-based modeling of individual behaviour. His PhD thesis “Modeling collective emotions in online communities” provides an example of how agent-based modeling can be used to construct an integrated approach to collective emotional phenomena in cyberspace. His postdoctoral research on opinion polarization and online privacy has been funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the ETH Risk Centre.

David’s work lies at the intersection of various scientific disciplines, combining methods from network science, computer science, and statistical physics to answer questions from psychology, economics, and political science. His interdisciplinary collaborations span more than 50 co-authors in 12 countries. David has published more than 20 journal articles, 15 conference papers, and 5 book chapters, and serves as reviewer for prestigious journals and as program committee member of numerous computer science conferences.