Background and activities

I am a computational social scientist 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., laws). My research includes

  • the use of agent-based simulations to analyse and explain observed human behaviour (how we arrived at working social systems), 
  • the encoding of laws and regulation and their representation in software (how we can make policies accessible to software),
  • the evaluation of policy using agent-based simulation (what is the effect of existing and novel regulation),
  • the development of technology that performs institutional functions in the real world (e.g., how we can automate the generation of smart contracts).

Before my study in Germany (MSc, University of Koblenz) and New Zealand (PhD, University of Otago), I gained industrial experience in system and network administration as well as software engineering. In addition to my research, I am teaching in the areas of cloud technologies and serious games and am responsible for the local coordination of our Master in Applied Computer Science Programme (MACS).

For more details and an overview of associated publications, please refer to the links to my website. (The list of publications at the bottom of this page only contains recent publications.)

Scientific, academic and artistic work

A selection of recent journal publications, artistic productions, books, including book and report excerpts. See all publications in the database

Journal publications

Part of book/report

  • Frantz, Christopher. (2020) Unleashing the Agents: From a Descriptive to an Explanatory Perspective in Agent-Based Modelling. Advances in Social Simulation. Looking in the Mirror.
  • Frantz, Christopher; Ghorbani, Amineh. (2019) Inequality: Driver or Inhibitor of Collective Action?. Social Simulation for a Digital Society.
  • Kianpour, Mazaher; Kowalski, Stewart James; Zoto, Erjon; Frantz, Christopher; Øverby, Harald. (2019) Designing Serious Games for Cyber Ranges: A Socio-technical Approach. 2019 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy Workshops (EuroS&PW).
  • Frantz, Christopher Konstantin; Pigozzi, Gabriella. (2018) Modelling Norm Dynamics in Multi-Agent Systems. Handbook of Normative Multiagent Systems.
  • Zoto, Erjon; Kowalski, Stewart James; Frantz, Christopher; Lopez Rojas, Edgar Alonso; Katt, Basel. (2018) A Pilot Study in Cyber Security Education Using CyberAIMs: A Simulation-Based Experiment. Information Security Education - Towards a Cybersecure Society.
  • Zoto, Erjon; Kowalski, Stewart James; Katt, Basel; Frantz, Christopher; Lopez Rojas, Edgar Alonso. (2018) CyberAIMs: A tool for teaching adversarial and systems thinking. International Defence and Homeland Security Simulation Workshop, DHSS 2018.