Fabian Veider

Bridging computational and mathematical tools for the study of opinion dynamics

As an interdisciplinary doctoral student at the Department of Environmental Systems Sciences and the Department of Mathematics and Scientific Computing, my research aims to understand how differences in beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors can persist and even be amplified in social networks, despite many indications that interactions between people often lead to an increased consensus. Furthermore, I want to explore how regulations could potentially mitigate and regulate the mechanisms responsible for polarization. Focusing on a combination of agent-based simulation methods and tools from applied analysis, I am going to investigate how time-dependent interactions and different network structures, as seen in social media and other types of communities, impact the fragmentation of opinions. Regulations are, among other methods, realized as external agents and time-dependent network modifications. I aim to obtain both rigorous results about time behavior of simple but still realistic systems and combine them with simulation results, allowing for a better insight and potential guidance of social networks.