Prof. Dr. Dirk Helbing
Prof. Dr. Dirk Helbing
Full Professor at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences
Curriculum Vitae
Dirk Helbing is Professor of Computational Social Science at the Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences at ETH Zurich and affiliate of its Computer Science Department. Furthermore, he is member of the external faculty of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna.
In January 2014, Prof. Helbing received an honorary PhD from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). Shortly later, he was also affiliate professor at the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at TU Delft for some years, where he led the PhD school in "Engineering Social Technologies for a Responsible Digital Future“.
Dirk Helbing started as a physicist. With his diploma thesis, he initiated the area of pedestrian, crowd, and evacuation modeling and simulation. During his PhD and habilitation in physics, he helped to establish the fields of socio-, econo- and traffic physics. He was also co-founder of the Physics of Socio-Economic Systems Division of the German Physical Society (DPG).
The work of Prof. Helbing is documented by hundreds of media reports and publications, among them more than 10 papers in Nature, Science, and PNAS. He won various prizes, including the Idee Suisse Award. He co-founded the Competence Center for Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems (CCSS), the Risk Center, the Institute for Science, Technology and Policy (ISTP), and the Decision Science Laboratory (DeSciL). While coordinating the FuturICT initiative (external page www.futurict.eu), he helped to establish data science and computational social science in Europe, as well as global systems science.
Research area
Research of the Computational Social Science (COSS) group aims at three-fold integration:
1. bringing modeling and computer simulation of techno-socio-economic processes and phenomena together with related empirical, experimental, and data-driven work,
2. combining perspectives of different scientific disciplines (e.g. social, data, computational and complexity science), and
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, and conflicts, collective opinion formation, and the wisdom of crowds. The team uses methods such as evolutionary game theoretical modelling, agent-based computer simulations, as well as lab and web experiments. The COSS team is also interested in systemic risk and resilience, the importance of complexity science for digital models of the world, the ethics of smart cities, digital democracy, and the development of a socio-ecological finance system («Finance 4.0», «FIN4+»).
The Computational Social Science (COSS) team publishes in highly competitive journals, enjoys an international reputation, and has raised substantial research funds. In particular, it has recently won its second ERC Advanced Investigator Grant.
Publications
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