Team

Prof. Dr. Christof Weinhardt

Project Lead

is a professor at the Institute for Information Science and Marketing (IISM) at KIT and director at the FZI. He heads the Information and Market Engineering group and the FZI House of Participation, conducting research on interdisciplinary topics related to market engineering with applications in the energy industry and digital democracy, among others. He initiated the SOSEC research project.

Dr. Jonas Fegert

Project Lead

is a department head at the FZI Research Center for Information Technology and a postdoctoral researcher at KIT with the Digital Democracy & Participation research group. At FZI, he leads the House of Participation competence center. His research focuses on digital democracy, including combating disinformation campaigns and exploring alternative platforms for citizen participation.

Prof. Dr. Michael Mäs

is a professor of Sociology and Computational Social Science at KIT. His research centers around the causes of opinion polarization on the internet and the effects of personalization algorithms, disinformation, and social bots on public debates and democratic decision-making processes.

Prof. Dr. Achim Rettinger

is a professor of computational linguistics at the University of Trier and director at the FZI. He earned his PhD from TU Munich and his habilitation from KIT, both in the field of machine learning for the evaluation of texts and knowledge graphs. His research aims to make content knowledge and patterns in external and internal communication visible by studying human communication behavior in media and companies.

David Borukhson

is a research associate at the IISM at KIT. In his research, he is interested in information technology that has a positive impact on social values – such as democracy, accessibility of knowledge, ethically sound decision-making and sustainability.

Marvin Motz

is a researcher at the KIT Faculty of Economics and deals with topics such as information systems in finance
sustainable finance, data analysis and machine learning and asset pricing. As part of SOSEC, his research focuses in particular on sustainable investing.

Cosima Pfannschmidt

works in the IPE (Information Process Engineering) department at the FZI. She coordinates research projects (e.g. SOSEC and TWON) and is interested in social polarization, the influence of online social networks on democratic debates and the role of AI in the spread of disinformation.

Christina Speck

is a research associate at the IISM at KIT. Christina’s research includes topics such as public engagement in the energy transition through digital services, investigating energy justice in the energy transition and improving energy literacy through the design of interactive platforms.

Jasper Büll

works as a research assistant at the FZI. He is interested in digital platforms and urban political spaces and their relationship with democratic systems.

Miriam Coccia

is a Research Assistant at FZI and a Master’s student in Natural Language Processing (NLP) in Trier. She specialises in using LLMs and generative agents to investigate social group characteristics and communication patterns, leveraging social media and survey data. Her research focuses on creating highly realistic generative agents to model and predict how people may react to social events, enhancing the understanding of social dynamics.

Louisa Glaum

is a research assistant in Professor Weinhardt’s department. She helps with various statistical evaluations of the data and is also working intensively on the creation and development of an analysis dashboard.

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