Lorenz-Spreen, Philipp

I am a computational social scientist at the Center for Adaptive Rationality and I lead the junior research group “Computational Social Science” at the Center Synergy of Systems at TU Dresden (group website here). We are researching the self-organized online discourse and its impact on democracies worldwide.

My aim is to better understand the interplay between human behaviour and the connectivity and functioning of online platforms, in particular how this affects our public discourse and thus our democracy. But also to question the current status quo and explore how this technology offers untapped opportunities for an improved information landscape and participatory democracy lived online. (here more eloquently put by David Bowie)

Here at the Center for Adaptive Rationality, I conduct research together with the team of the "Cognition in Online Environments" research area. I have been teaching the "Applied Network Science" course in the Master of Data Science at the Hertie School for the last few semesters. Currently, I am also looking into the new data access rights for researchers within the Digital Services Act.

Previously, I did my PhD at the TU Berlin on empirical methods and theoretical models to describe the dynamics of collective attention from online data sets. At the LMU in Munich I studied physics with a focus on systems biophysics. My areas of interest are:

• Online Behaviour
• Complex systems
• Social Networks
• Computational social science
• Decision making
• Opinion dynamics

Ongoing projects:

• Reclaiming Autonomy Online (RAO)
• Social Media for Democracy (SOME4DEM)