Prof. David Garcia

david.garcia@uni-konstanz.de
Professor for Social and Behavioral Data Science, Department of Politics and Public Administration, University of Konstanz
Also affiliated with TU Graz, CSH Vienna, and ETH Zurich

ResearcherID: A-2113-2014
ORCID: 0000-0002-2820-9151
Scopus: 56817130300
Google Scholar Profile

Research Experience

• Professor for Social and Behavioral Data Science – University of Konstanz
  Department of Politics and Public Administration                                    Since October 2022
  Member of the Extended Directorate of the Centre for HUMAN | DATA | SOCIETY
• Full Professor for Computational Behavioral and Social Sciences – TU Graz
  Faculty of Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering       October 2020 – February 2023
• Group leader – Medical University of Vienna                     September 2017 to August 2022
  Leading a Vienna Research Group funded by the WWTF
• Faculty at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna                               Since September 2017
• External faculty (privatdozent) – TU Graz                                         Since December 2022
• External faculty (privatdozent) – ETH Zurich                                     Since February 2018
• Senior researcher – ETH Zurich                                               January 2015 to August 2017
  Research on emotions and polarization in participatory media, funded by the Swiss SNF
• Postdoctoral researcher – ETH Zurich                            September 2012 to December 2014
  Research on digital traces of emotions, privacy, and resilience in social media
• Research Assistant – Chair of Systems Design                  September 2009 to August 2012
  Participation in EU FP7 project Cyberemotions, taking part on project reporting and reviews
  Responsible of the ICT infrastructure of the chair. User and systems administration
• Research Assistant – Network Visualization                       November 2008 to August 2009
  Developer of Cuttlefish a graph visualization project Java
• Master Thesis and Research Assistant – ETH Zurich            September 2008 to March 2009
  Analysis of higher-order structures of equilibrium networks, supervised by Prof. Peter Widmayer
• Semester Project – International Conflict Research                              March to June 2008
  ETH Zurich. Supervisor: Prof. Lars-Erik Cederman. Agent-based modeling of resource conflict.
• Student Internship, Knowledge Engineering Institute UAM    June 2006 to February 2007
  Development of machine learning systems for fraud detection

Education

• December 2022: Approval of habilitation (umhabilitierung) at TU Graz
• February 2018: Habilitation in Computational Social Science (Venia Legendi) at ETH Zurich
  Habilitation thesis: Understanding Emotions and Social Interactions in the Digital Society
• October 2012: Dr. ETH Zurich, Chair of Systems Design
  Doctoral thesis: Modeling collective emotions in online communities
• August 2009: M.S. ETH Zurich, Computer Science, Theory of Computation track
  Master thesis title: Higher-order Distributions of Complex Networks.
• June 2007: B.S. Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Computer Engineering

Advisory positions in industry

• Kuourm.org, R&D Advisor since April 2015
• Carbon Delta, Data Science Advisor (2015-2017)

Awards

• WWTF Vienna Research Groups for Young Investigators 2016 (1.6 Million Euro)
• Research on social resilience listed in MIT Technology Review Best of 2013
• 1st prize in the 6th and 8th ETH Science Slams and in the Zurich Euraxess Slam
• Comunidad de Madrid: University access (2003) and Excellence Scholarships (2004 and 2005)

Research Skills

• Computational social science. Statistical analysis of digital traces of human behavior
• Information retrieval technologies, social networks and sentiment analysis
• Dynamical systems analysis applied to agent-based models of collective social behavior
• Project proposal design and writing (Swiss NSF, ERC, FWF, WWTF)
• Interdisciplinary and international collaboration experience. Successful collaboration with psychologists, political scientists, physicists, and computer scientists
• Open dissemination of research results in Github and through online visualization

Technical Skills

• R statistical language: Frequentist and Bayesian statistics, machine learning
• Python for data processing, natural language processing, and information retrieval
• SQL database administration and design
• Spark and MongoDB: user-level experience
• Unix scripting for automated testing and data processing
• Java and C: Software engineering experience

Review Service

• Senior program committee member of ICWSM 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019
• Associate editor of EPJ Data Science
• Guest editor of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
• Editor of the Journal of Digital Social Research
• Program Chair of NetSci 2023 Vienna
• General Chair of the European Symposium Series on Societal Challenges
  in Computational Social Science 2019: Polarization and Radicalization
• Guest editor of PLOS One
• Reviewer for journals including Nature, Science, Nature Communications, PNAS, Science Advances, Scientific Reports, Nature Human Behavior, PLOS One, and Journal of the Royal Society Interface
• Programme Committee member of WWW ’15 – ’18, KDD ’17, SocialCom ’13, ’14,  HyperText ’14, ’15, NetSci, IC2S2, CSS Winter Symposium

• [Full Service List]

Academic and Research Service

• Member of the GESIS Coordination Group for Digital Behavioral Data (2022-)
• Chair of the Curriculum commission for Computational Social Science at TU Graz (2021-)

More Information

Publication List

Research Interests

Talk List

Full Service List

Selected Media Responses