Short-CV and expertise

David Garcia is professor for Social and Behavioural Data Science at the University of Konstanz since 2022 and Faculty Member of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. He is a member of the Extended Directorate of the Centre for Human | Data | Society at the University of Konstanz since October 2022. He studied Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and ETH Zürich. In 2009 he earned his master ‘s degree (thesis: Analysis of higher-order structures of equilibrium networks), followed by the doctorate in 2012 (thesis: Modeling collective emotions in online communities). He obtained his habilitation in Computational Social Sciences in 2018 at the ETH Zürich (thesis: Understanding Emotions and Social Interactions in the Digital Society). David Garcia has expert knowledge in Computational Social Science investigating human behavior through digital traces with methods from complexity science. Analyzing big social data by using computational modeling, he aims to understand the impact of line media and social media networks on individuals and society (e.g. inequalities, data privacy).

Research-related publications

• Jana Lasser, Segun Aroyehun, Almog Simchon, Fabio Carrella, David Garcia, Stephan Lewandowsky. Social media sharing of low-quality news sources by political elites. PNAS
• Nexus (2022) https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgac186
• José González-Cabañas, Ángel Cuevas, Rubén Cuevas, Juan López-Fernández, David García. Unique on Facebook: formulation and evidence of (nano) targeting individual users with non-PII data. Proceedings of the 21st ACM Internet Measurement
• Conference (2021) https://doi.org/10.1145/3487552.3487861
• David Garcia, Bernard Rimé. Collective Emotions and Social Resilience in the Digital Traces After a Terrorist Attack. Psychological Science 30(4) (2019) https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619831964
• David Garcia, Yonas Mitike Kassa, Angel Cuevas, Manuel Cebrian, Esteban Moro, Iyad
• Rahwan, Ruben Cuevas. Analyzing gender inequality through large-scale Facebook advertising data. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2018) https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1717781115
• David Garcia, Mansi Goel, Amod Agrawal, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru. Collective aspects of privacy in the Twitter social network. EPJ Data Science 7:3 (2018) https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-018-0130-3
• David Garcia. Leaking privacy and shadow profiles in online social networks. Science
• Advances 3 (8) e1701172 (2017) https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1701172
• David Garcia, Frank Schweitzer. Social signals and algorithmic trading of Bitcoin. Royal
• Society Open Science 2:150288 (2015) https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150288
• David Garcia, Adiya Abisheva, Simon Schweighofer, Uwe Serdült,
• Frank Schweitzer. Ideological and Temporal Components of Network Polarization in Online Political Participatory Media. Policy & Internet 7, 1 (2015) https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.82
• David Garcia, Pavlin Mavrodiev, Frank Schweitzer. Social resilience in online communities: The autopsy of Friendster. First ACM Conference on Online Social Networks (COSN)
• (2013) https://doi.org/10.1145/2512938.2512946
• David Garcia, Marcelo Serrano Zanetti, Frank Schweitzer. The role of emotions in contributors activity: A case study of the Gentoo community. International Conference on
• Social Computing and Its Applications, pp 410-417 (2013) https://doi.org/10.1109/CGC.2013.71
• Stephan Lewandowsky, Laura Smillie, David Garcia, Ralph Hertwig, Jim Weatherall, Stefanie Egidy, Ronald E. Robertson, Cailin O’connor, Anastasia Kozyreva, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, Yannik Blaschke, Mark Leiser. Technology and Democracy: Understanding the influence of online technologies on political behaviour and decision-making. Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg (2020) https://doi.org/10.2760/709177
• David Garcia. Privacy beyond the individual. Nature Human Behavior (2019) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0513-2
• Hannah Metzler, David Garcia. Social drivers and algorithmic mechanisms on digital media. Psyarxiv preprint (2022) https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/cxa9u
• David Garcia, Victor Galaz, Stefan Daume. EATLancet vs yes2meat: the digital backlash to the planetary health diet. The Lancet 394(10215) (2019) https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(19)32526-7
• Hannah Metzler, Max Pellert, David Garcia. Using social media data to capture emotions before and during COVID-19. World Happiness Report (2022) https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2022/using-social-media-data-to-capture-emotions-before-and-during-covid-19/
• Jana Lasser, Segun Aroyehun, Fabio Carrella, Almog Simchon, David Garcia, Stephan Lewandowsky. From alternative conceptions of honesty to alternative facts in communications by U.S. politicians. Arxiv preprint (2022) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2208.10814
• David Garcia, Max Pellert, Jana Lasser, Hannah Metzler. Social media emotion macroscopes reflect emotional experiences in society at large. Arxiv preprint (2021) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2107.13236
• Jonas Schöne, David Garcia, Brian Parkinson, Amit Goldenberg. Negative Expressions are Shared more on Twitter for Public Figures than for Ordinary Users. Psyarxiv preprint (2022) https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/wng5v
• Anna Di Natale, David Garcia. LEXpander: applying colexification networks to automated lexicon expansion. Arxiv preprint (2022) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2205.15850
• David Garcia, Antonios Garas, Frank Schweitzer. The language-dependent relationship between word happiness and frequency. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2015). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1502909112