Ralf Kurvers
Ralf is the PI of the research group. Ralf did his PhD in behavioral ecology at the Wageningen University, studying the role of individual differences in social information use and collective movement in bird flocks. After his PhD, Ralf joined the lab of Jens Krause as a postdoc working on collective decision making in fish and human groups. In 2016 Ralf established his own research group at the MPIB where he works at the interface of behavioral ecology, social psychology and collective behavior. Ralf is also a PI in the Science of Intelligence Excellence Cluster, and a guest researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries.
Kiri Kuroda (postdoc)
Kiri obtained his PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Tokyo and is interested in social and collective decision-making in humans, and studies these processes using behavioral experiments, eye-tracking, and cognitive modeling. Kiri has joined the lab early 2023 for a 3-year postdoc funded by the Japan Foundation. In his work with us, Kiri investigates how individuals in groups coordinate their decision timing using behavioral experiments and cognitive modeling.
Marwa Kavelaars (Postdoc)
Marwa is a behavioral biologist with an interest in movement ecology and foraging behavior. For her PhD at the University of Antwerp, Marwa worked on these topics in seabirds, using GPS tracking and behavioral observations. In her work with us, Marwa is studying the movement patters and foraging decisions of large groups of icefishers in competitive and cooperative settings, funded by the Walter Benjamin Program (DFG).
Nikolas Zöller (postdoc)
Nikolas did a masters in physics at the Free University in Berlin and is about to finish his PhD in data engineering from the Jacobs University Bremen on The Structure and Dynamics of Groups in Open Source Software Development: A Computational Social Science Approach to Understanding Online Collaboration. With us, Nikolas is working on harnessing collective and artificial intelligence in open-ended decision problems in the HACID project.
Félicie Dhellemmes (postdoc)
Félicie is a behavioral ecologist interested in the causes and consequences of consistent individual differences in behavior. For her PhD, Félicie studied the role of individual differences in space use and fitness in juvenile lemon sharks at the Bahamas. For her first postdoc, she studied the spatial movement of pike in Northern Germany using acoustic telemetry. With us, Félicie is working on quantifying the interplay between the collective hunting of icefishers, and the collective evasion of the prey schools under the ice within the Science of Intelligence Excellence Cluster.
Shweta Suran (postdoc)
Shweta completed her PhD in Computer Science at the Department of Software Science at Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia developing a generic framework for collective intelligence systems. Shweta is interested in collective intelligence, collective behavior, social network analysis, data mining, and digital image processing. With us, Shweta is extending her (already very broad) expertise by studying human cognitive factors at play in online environments on a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship.
Mubashir Sultan (PhD student)
Mubashir (Mubs) holds a BA in Psychology and English Literature (Trinity College Dublin), an MSc in Cultural Psychology (Univ of Amsterdam) and an MSc in Brain and Cognitive Sciences (University of Amsterdam). Mubs research interest are social decision making with a focus on experimental methods and computational modeling. For his PhD, Mubs is studying the main drivers of misinformation, using behavioral experiments, cognitive modeling, and as of late, a meta-analysis approach, studying the overarching drivers of misinformation susceptibility.
Julian Berger (PhD student)
Julian holds a BA in Politics, Administration and International Relations (Zeppeling Univ), and an MSc in Psychology in Business and Economics (Univ Catolica Portuguesa, Lisbon). Julian’s research interest are the psychology of decision making in social settings and institutions, wisdom of crowds and policy implications, interventions and aggregation mechanisms for improved group performance, development of open science and meta-science. In his PhD, Julian is studying collective intelligence and fast-and-frugal heuristics in medical diagnostics, with a focus on diagnosing mental disorders.
Alexander Schakowski (PhD student)
Alex conducted a Master in Psychology at the Heidelberg University. Alex has a broad interest in social behavior and social cognition, and is especially interested in how techniques from cognitive psychology can be applied to study social decision making. Alex did his Master thesis with us, investigating how integrating decision maker’s metacognition can improve wisdom of the crowd estimates. Early 2022 Alex joined us as a PhD student studying the socio-ecological drivers of human foraging in the wild, gathering data on a novel human foraging system, namely icefishers in Finland.
Valerii Chirkov (PhD student)
Valerii studied Clinical Psychology as his first Master degree and is currently pursuing a second master’s degree in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Valerii is completing his master thesis with us studying the evolution of signaling in collective resource tracking, using agent based models and immersive reality experiments in Unity. After his masters Valerii will continue as a PhD student, in collaboration with the Science of Intelligence Cluster studying these processes in collective robotics.
Ilse Pit (PhD student)
Ilse is conducting her PhD at the School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford, focusing on how human cooperation between people of different groups is influenced by how typical individuals are for their group. Ilse joined the research group for 1 year (on a Leverhulme Trust fellowship) to study how social norms influence the cognitive processes when judging online misinformation veracity.
If you are interested in the work we do and joining the group or collaborating, please get in touch.
Previous members
Dominik Deffner (postdoc)
Dominik worked in our group for 3 years as a Postdoc, studying human collective foraging in immerse environments and in the icefishing project . This was a hybrid position together with the Excellence Cluster Science of Intelligence at the TU Berlin and part of a larger project investigating collective search in analytic (humans) and synthetic systems (robots). After his postdoc position, Dominik started a W1 Professor position in Computational Modeling at the Marburg University. Website
Alan Tump (PhD and postdoc)
Alan finished his PhD in our research group in which he investigated the cognitive mechanisms underlying decision making in human collectives. After that, Alan continued his research with us as a Postdoc further expanding his exciting work on applying social drift diffusion models to social systems to uncover the temporal dynamics of collectives. This was a hybrid position together with the Excellence Cluster Science of Intelligence at the TU Berlin. After his postdoc, Alan started a position as data scientist at the Robert Koch Institute. Website
Bertrand Jayles (postdoc)
After completing his PhD in social physics at Toulouse university, studying collective human behavior using techniques from statistical physics, Bertrand joined our group as a postdoc. During his stay with us Bertrand focused on collective intelligence, social influence and cognitive biases in human groups. After spending three years with us Bertrand moved to the Singapore University for his next postdoc in cooperation with the ETH in Zurich. Website
David Wollny-Huttarsch (Master thesis / RA)
David has finished his Master in Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience at the Maastricht University. David conducted his Master thesis with us investigating how the timing of social information impacts its uptake using online experimental studies. In his time with us he has developed a keen interest in JavaScript modeling and Bayesian statistics. Website
Marta Balode (RA)
Marta worked as an RA with us while conducting her Master in Neural Systems and Computation at the ETH in Zurich. Marta is interested in computational neuroscience and the application of machine learning techniques to solve complex societal problems. Marta worked in our group as a programming RA, providing vital support for conducting online interactive group studies. The to-go person for any debugging. Website
Deyan Dzhurov (RA)
Deyan worked as an RA with us when pursuing his Master in Informatics at the Free University of Berlin. During his time with us, Deyan worked as a programming RA, bringing his skills in C++, Java and Python to live in projects ranging from real-time communication between tablets for collective decision making studies, to online studies, to programming apps for museum expositions.
Clemens Baldzuhn (RA)
Clemens worked as an RA with us while conducting the Data Science Track of the Statistics Master at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Clemens is passionate about mathematics and human behavior. Clemens worked as an RA with us on the ice-fishing project; his activities ranged from analyzing videos, digitizing data, and spatial data analysis.
Ethan Dampf (RA)
Ethan worked as an RA with us while pursuing his Master in Cognitive Linguistics at the University of Potsdam. As an RA, Ethan worked on numerous tasks, including database management, organizing lab participants and running experiments. Website
Justin Yeung (Internship)
Justin is interested in the interplay between digital media, artificial intelligence and their societal impacts. With us, Justin worked on automatically extracting features from news headlines to study the role of linguistic and emotional features on veracity judgments, while finishing his Bachelor of Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam.
Hanzhe Lin (Internship)
Hanzhe did an internship with us while pursuing his master degree Nature and Forest Conservation at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. In his internship, Hanzhe explored the effect of ageing on movement trajectories of human foragers in the wild.
Roberto Sautto (Internship)
Robert did an internship with us while conducting a M.Sc. in Cognitive Science (Aarhus Univ). Robert has an interest in Natural Language Processing, data modeling, human-computer interactions and design foundations of programming. In his internship with us, Robert implemented an agent based simulation of agents accumulating evidence across different networks conditions to study the effect of network composition on information spread.
Cheyenne Cavender (Internship)
Cheyenne conducted an internship with us building a large-scale database on studies on misinformation brushing up her skills on data tidying in R and version control in GitHub. At the time Cheyenne was in her second year of her study Psychology at the Jacobs University in Bremen. She has a fascination for social learning strategies, collective intelligence, and social-cognitive disorders.
Ruth Marheinecke (Internship)
Ruth conducted an internship with is while finishing her Masters in Psychology at the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena. Ruth has a keen interest in how identities shape group processes. For her internship, Ruth started to build a large-scale database on studies on misinformation brushing up her skills on data tidying in R, archiving metadata (rjson) and version control in GitHub.
Aaron Lob (Internship)
Aaron conducted an internship with us while finishing his bachelor in Psychology at the Heidelberg University. Aaron’s main research interest lies in the field of cognitive social psychology. In his internship Aaron used machine learning techniques for optimizing wisdom of crowd accuracy in large datasets. After leaving, Aaron started a Master in Psychology at the University of Amsterdam website
Nina Ehmann (Bachelor thesis)
Nina is studying Psychology at the University of Konstanz and is interested in human decision making under risk and uncertainty using quantitative and data science approaches. With us, Nina first did an internship on a meta-analysis project on the psychological and demographic variables impacting news veracity judgements of online news. Nina also conducted her bachelor thesis with us studying evidence accumulation processes in dermatologists under time pressure.
Ralf Kurvers 