Dirk Helbing

Biography

working as a professor

Research Interest

Research at the Professorship of Computational Social Science aims at three-fold integration: (1) bringing modeling and computer simulation of social processes and phenomena together with related empirical, experimental, and data-driven work, (2) combining perspectives of different scientific disciplines (e.g. socio-physics, social, computer and complexity science), (3) bridging between fundamental and applied work. The research focus has quickly moved from studying pedestrian crowds and vehicle traffic to studying social coordination, cooperation, norms, crime and conflict as well as collective opinion formation and the wisdom of crowds. The team uses methods such as evolutionary game theoretical modeling, agent-based computer simulations, as well as lab and web experiments. The analysis of Big Data, cultural science, real-time data mining ("Nervousnet", "Planetary Nervous System"), the creation of self-organizing systems, innovation and the investigation how science works, are further subjects of interest ("Innovation Accelerator"). The COSS team is also engaged in the study of systemic risks, and possible measures of risk reduction and disaster response, including earthquake resilience and advice on epidemic spreading.