Computational Social Sciences: Interplay Between Computer and Human

David Garcia is of Computational Behavioral and Social Sciences at TU Graz © Lunghammer - TU Graz By Birgit Baustädter - How emotional are we online? Is social media fuelling the polarization of our society? Can I inquire about the character of an artificial intelligence? David Garcia asks himself questions like these at TU Graz. Computer scientist David Garcia wants to understand people. "The social sciences are the hard sciences: it is very hard to obtain trustworthy data, compared to physics, for example. Research is limited to surveys and studies, but there is so much we don't yet know about complex human systems," explains the 35-year-old professor of computational behavioral and social sciences at the Institute of Interactive Systems and Data Science at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz). For him, the interplay between new technologies and people's behaviour is interesting. How do people change in the presence of seemingly constantly eavesdropping household objects? How does this loss of privacy affect our ability to talk about feelings or seek help? How do people communicate after highly emotional events like a terrorist attack or an environmental disaster? And what considerations are made by an artificial intelligence (AI) whose results are auditable but whose working path remains invisible? Data security and privacy. Data security and privacy play a major role in David Garcia's research.