Part of the Bristol and Bath Psychology seminar series jointly hosted by both the School of Psychological Science and the Department of Psychology, respectively.
Abstract: The digital transformation of our society offers a wealth of data on human behavior captured by information and communication technologies, such as social media and smartphones. This has given rise to Computational Social Science as an interdisciplinary endeavor that develops computational methods that shed a new light on human behavior. I will present novel methods that can be combined to study society across levels: from large-scale data analysis of whole societies to individual-level behavior on social media. These levels of analysis are connected by a combination of big data techniques, natural language processing methods, and computational agent-based models. I will show how this perspective can be applied to study the dynamics of online polarization, to measure gender inequality across the world, and to understand the dynamics and relevance of collective emotions.
Bio: David Garcia is Full Professor for Computational Behavioral and Social Sciences at the Graz University of technology and group leader at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. David holds computer science degrees from Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (Spain) and ETH Zurich (Switzerland). David 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, polarization, inequality, and privacy, combining statistical analyses of large datasets of online interaction with computational models. David’s work lies at the intersection of various scientific disciplines, applying methods from network science, computer science, and statistical physics to answer questions from psychology and sociology. His interdisciplinary collaborations span more than 50 co-authors in 15 countries. David has published more than 60 articles in prestigious journals and serves as editor and reviewer for various journals and computer science conferences.