About COSS

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 runs internationally visible research projects. Applications reach from network models of epidemic spreading over virtual reality simulations of the Love Parade disaster to digital assistance systems for increased sustainability. Incentive systems supporting collective intelligence and a multi-dimensional, socio-ecological finance system are also of interest.