€2-million Human-Machine Social Systems (HUMANET) Lab launches

This October, the HUMANET lab pioneered by Dr Milena Tsvetkova officially launched. Qiusi Sun and Thomas Gaskin join her as research officers.

The €2-million ERC Consolidator grant-funded HUMANET lab studies networks composed of humans and intelligent machines like bots and algorithms. Employing experimental, computational, and data science methods, they aim to build the foundations of a new cumulative empirical sociology of humans and machines.

The project focuses on how human-machine, machine-machine, and human-human interactions influence and affect each other and how they add up to different collective outcomes.

It bridges sociology, social psychology, human-computer interaction, and web science and combines experimental, computational, and data science methods in the form of controlled virtual lab experiments, agent-based models, digital-trace data analysis, and online field interventions.