Three keynote speeches from leading scholars in the field will introduce computational social science and the topic of social cohesion. Our experts are experienced scholars either in computational social science methods or on the research topic of important aspects of social cohesion (or both). During the summer school, each experts gives a lecture and/or a hands-on workshop.
Most of our experts will also lead projects. During the summer school, two experts work together and build a team with up to four students on one specific research topic. The experts’ task is to lead the research project and supervise students. Ideally, the research project finishes with a publication.
Organizers and Experts
Jan Lorenz | Jacobs University (Bremen, Gemany)
Jan Lorenz is a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in Computational Social Science at Jacobs University. He obtained a PhD in Mathematics from University of Bremen and was a postdoc at ETH Zürich, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, and GESIS. He is interested in opinion dynamics and collective decisions and uses agent-based and data-driven dynamical modeling. He also worked on comparative projects on measuring social cohesion.
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Andreas Flache | University of Groningen (Netherlands)
Andreas Flache is professor of sociology at the Department of Sociology and the ICS, at the Faculty for Social and Behavioral Sciences of the University of Groningen. He studies in particular modeling of norms and networks. Other research interest address social integration, cooperation problems, and learning theory. For this, he applies agent-based computational and game theoretical modeling, laboratory experiments, network research, and survey research. His research is embedded in the research program of the ICS (Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology), a research and training center accredited by the Royal Academy of Sciences (KNAW).
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Michael Mäs | Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany)
Michael Mäs is professor of socioloogy at KIT. He was assistant professor at the Department of Sociology and the ICS at the University of Groningen. His general research interest concerns collective action and social integration in social networks. He uses uses computational modeling techniques, longitudinal network data in several organizations, and laboratory experiments.
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Experts
Wahideh Achbari | University of Amsterdam (Netherlands)
Wahideh Achbari is a Marie Curie research fellow at the University of Amsterdam. Previously she has been affiliated with the Research and Documentation Centre of the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security as a project leader and has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Free University Brussels. Her research lies at the intersection of political sociology, migration studies, and political psychology. In her work she seeks to understand the processes behind crime, the creation and loss of generalized trust, and confidence in governments. She is particularly interested in the impact of ethnic diversity on social cohesion, but also the methodological implications that follow from extant research. Wahideh uses a wide range of statistical techniques such as multilevel, structural equation modelling, panel analysis, and machine learning. She draws on survey questionnaires, register, and experimental data.
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Michał Bojanowski | Kozminski University (Warsaw, Poland)
Michał Bojanowski is a sociologist currently working as an Assistant Professor at Kozminski University. His main research interests focus on (dynamics of) social networks and mathematical/computational social science as tools for understanding conflict and cooperation. He is a seasoned R developer enjoying programming and training others.
Hilke Brockmann | Jacobs University (Bremen, Germany)
Hilke Brockmann is a professor in sociology at Jacobs University. She is interested in things that matter to people: aging, happiness, inequality, and technological progress. She is also keen to experiment with new methodologies. Currently, she is a program coordinator of a new program on Data Science for Society and Business. She spent time at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence setting up a new ‘data clinic’ and her current research looks into elite behavior, happiness of migrants and locals, and meritocracy. She began her career studying Sociology, Psychology, Political Science, Public Law, and empirical methods in Germany, the UK and the USA. She has worked at the laboratory of longevity at the Max-Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, at the scientific institute of the AOK, Germany’s largest health insurer, at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and at the East-West-Institute in New York. She taught at the universities of the Federal Armed Forces, Hamburg, Philipps University Marburg, Bremen University, Shanghai University, EUI, and Jacobs University.
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Corinne Coen | Case Western Reserve University (Ohio, USA)
Corinne Coen is an Associate Professor in the Organizational Behavior Department of the Weatherhead School of Management. She earned a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in Business Administration where she worked in the Center for the Study of Complex Systems. In addition, she holds an MBA from the University of Chicago, and BA in American Culture from the University of Michigan.
Professor Coen has expertise in group and organizational dynamics and the use of agent-based modeling to study dynamics. Her work focuses on how the effects of interdependent behavior, especially cooperation and competition, generate cohesion and other emergent properties.
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Wiebke Drews | Universität der Bundeswehr München (Germany)
Wiebke drews is a postdoc at the Universität der Bundeswehr München where she is responsible for the use case “Elections” of the research project SPARTA. She is also the co-director of euandi2021, a VAA for the German elections powered by the European University Institute (EUI). In November 2020, she obtained her PhD from the EUI with doctoral thesis “Digital Politics Across Contexts, Social Media, Parties and Citizens: Technological Opportunities and Challenges in Modern Democracies”. Her research is located at the nexus between politics and the digital with a particular interest in how new ICTs impact on representative democracy, how they transform political participation and the relationship between voters and parties, as well as party competition more broadly. She is passionate about social media analytics and text-as-data.
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Bruce Edmonds | Manchester Metropolitan University (UK)
Bruce Edmonds is Professor of Social Simulation and Director of the Centre for Policy Modelling at the Manchester Metropolitan University. He is expert at the methodology and application of agent-based simulation as applied to issues of policy interest. He is the coordinator of an EU H2020 project on populism and the UK PI of an ORA/ESRC project on mutual influence.
Seth Frey | University of California, Davis (USA)
Seth Frey is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication, where he is in the Computational Communication group. He is an interdisciplinary social scientist who uses large datasets and computational methods to isolate the decision processes behind complex, large-scale, and real-world social phenomena. He specialized in studying the self-organization of governance and culture at a whole-system scale by using “designed societies” like sports matches, theme parks, multiplayer video games, and online communities. By working at the intersection of many methods and disciplines, he has introduced approaches that provide new insights into governance processes in small-scale online communities and the science of social system design generally.
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Mako Hill | University of Washington (USA)
Mako Hill studies collective action in online communities and seeks to understand why some attempts at collaborative production—like Wikipedia and Linux—build large volunteer communities while the vast majority never attract even a second contributor. His research is deeply interdisciplinary, consists primarily of “big data” quantitative analyses, and lies at the intersection of communication, human-computer interaction, and sociology. He is an Assistant Professor in the University of Washington Department of Communication and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the departments of Human-Centered Design and Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering. He is also a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and an affiliate of the Institute of Quantitative Social Science at Harvard. He received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in an interdepartmental program involving the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Media Lab. His dissertation research was advised by Eric von Hippel, Yochai Benkler, Tom Malone and Mitch Resnick.
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Gert Jan Hofstede | Wageningen University (Netherlands)
Gert Jan Hofstede is a population biologist and his professorship has the title Artificial Sociality. He focuses on agent-based social simulation of socio-ecological or socio-technical systems. His ambition is to come up with generic social modules for agent-based models of such systems. He is interested in the interplay of the contrasting forces of cultural evolution, societal change and cultural stability.
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Marijn Keijzer | Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, IAST (France)
Marijn Keijzer holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Groningen where he worked on opinion dynamics in online social media. In his dissertation, he advocates a complexity approach to understanding the role of social media platforms in the emergence of polarization, using agent-based modeling and experiments. In 2021, Marijn joined the chair of Sociology and Computational Social Science at the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie as a postdoctoral researcher. Currently, Marijn is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST) at the University of Toulouse 1 Capitole in France.
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Yara Khaluf | Wageningen University (Netherlands)
Yara Khaluf is an assistant professor at the department of social sciences, the research group of information technology. Yara’s research focuses on collective intelligence in artificial societies. She focuses on developing computational models to describe individual and population complex behaviors. Among her main areas of interest are self-organized systems, networks, computational sociology, and swarm intelligence.
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Miranda Lubbers | Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain)
Miranda Lubbers investigates processes of social exclusion, social cohesion, and polarization at the micro-level, using a network perspective. She is an associate professor of anthropology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ICREA Acadèmia fellow, and Director of the Laboratory for Computational Analysis of Ego-networks, Social Cohesion, and Exclusion (COALESCE Lab) at the UAB. She was recently awarded the ERC Advanced Grant for the project “A network science approach to social cohesion in European societies,” and she is co-PI of the Volkswagen Foundation-funded project “Inclusivity norms to counter polarization in European societies” conducted with an international consortium. Both projects use a mix of methods, such as surveys, agent-based modeling and simulation, qualitative research, and network experiments. Miranda is associate editor of the journal Social Networks.
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Christian Papilloud | Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany)
Christian Papilloud is Professor for Sociology at Halle University working on relational schemes in a comparative and historically way, on the improvement of their understanding in sociological theory, as well as on the way to address them in qualitative empirical settings at the level of textual data by applying new classification algorithms in the form of softwares that he writes in the python and R languages.
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Francisco Rowe | University of Liverpool (UK)
Francisco Rowe is a Senior Lecturer in Human Quantitative Geography at the Department of Geography and Planning within the University of Liverpool, member of the Geographic Data Science Lab and a Project Associate of the international project IMAGE: Comparing Internal Migration Around the Globe. His areas of expertise are: internal & international migration; human mobility; and computational social science. He has been invited to present his research at the United Nations Population & Development Division in New York and works closely with the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, UK’s government organisations, including the Ordnance Survey and the ONS Data Campus, and commercial companies, Geolytix. Francisco is editor of REGION, the journal of the European Regional Science Association (2018-present).
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Reinhold Sackmann | Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany)
Reinhold Sackmann is Professor for Sociology at Halle university in Germany. There, he is the head of the Research Institute Social Cohesion, participating in the German polycentric Research Institute Social Cohesion. He is interested in the study of macrosocial dynamics and ways of institutional coping with social problems. One of the current projects focusses on the regional effects of migration on social cohesion. He combines quantitative longitudinal data analysis with qualitative analysis of texts.
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Jochem Tolsma | (Netherlands)
Jochem Tolsma is professor by special appointment of Social Divisions between Groups in the Department of Sociology at the University of Groningen and associate professor of social inequality in the Sociology Department of Radboud University Nijmegen. He is one of the founders of the Radboud University Network on Migrant Inclusion. In his research he focuses on social divisions between groups; the interplay of segregation, inequality and polarization. His particular areas of interest are the causes and consequences of segregation in neighborhoods, schools and friendship networks. He teaches on social inequality and social network analysis.
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Remote Experts
Eduardo Graells-Garrido | Barcelona Supercomputing Center (Spain)
Eduardo Graells-Garrido is a Mobility Researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, in Barcelona, Spain, and Part-time Professor at the Data Science Institute in Universidad del Desarrollo, Santiago, Chile. He is also a Telefonica R&D Chile Fellow. He is interested in improving the understanding of how people live their own city; his research lies in the intersection of Urban Informatics, Information Visualization, and Social Sciences. He also writes auto- and science-fiction — his favorite author is Ursula K. Le Guin.
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