Background and activities

I have an industrial background in system administration, software engineering and studied both in Germany (MSc, University of Koblenz) and New Zealand (PhD, University of Otago), before teaching in the areas of infrastructure operations, cloud computing, as well as application development.

As a computational social scientist, I am interested in the interaction between technology and institutions, that is manifestations of social behaviour, such as conventions, norms (e.g., behavioural etiquettes) and rules of interaction (e.g., traffic rules). My research includes

  • the use of agent-based simulations to analyse and explain human behaviour (how we arrived at working legal systems), 
  • the representation of institutional understanding in agents (how software agents learn and comprehend institutions),
  • the use of technology such as blockchain technology to build virtual organisations that have real-life functions (think about an operational decentralised virtual software development company).

For more details and the list of publications, please refer to the links to my website (links open in new tab).