David Garcia

I am the Professor for Social and Behavioral Data Science and lead the Social Data Science Lab at the Center for Data and Methods at the University of Konstanz. I am also Associate Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna and Privatdozent at ETH Zurich.

My research combines Computer Science, Complexity Science, and the Social Sciences to develop methods to study human behavior and responsible AI technologies to tackle critical societal challenges including misinformation, democratic backsliding, emotional well-being, and privacy risks. My recent work studies how AI agents can display emergent collective behavior that allows them to coordinate at scales larger than what we see for informal human groups. I also studied how LLMs express ideology in the text they produce and attitudes when producing democracy ratings. One of my most recent works shows how NLP methods can quantify rhetorics of populism in the US congress, revealing associations with polarization and economic inequality.

I studied Computer Science at ETH Zurich, where I also did my PhD in 2012 and my Habilitation in 2018. Then I moved to the Complexity Science Hub Vienna to build my first lab funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund. After my first full professor position at the Department of Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering at the Graz University of Technology, I joined the University of Konstanz in 2022. In Konstanz, I am a Directorate Member at the Centre for Human | Data | Society, Board member at the Cluster of Excellence “Politics of Inequality”, and Principal Investigator at the Centre for the Advanced Study of Collective Behavior.

Social Data Science – Complexity Science – Responsible AI