As a publicly-funded and non-profit organisation the KD²School trains the next generation of scholars to develop adaptive systems that support economic decision-making, focusing on interdisciplinary, fundamental and applied research.

What sentiments prevail in our societies? What are the drivers of polarization? With an innovative research design, we are capturing the mood of German and American society and anticipate negative, potentially antidemocratic tipping points.

The EU-funded project TWON (Twin of Online Social Networks) investigates the effects of social networks on democratic debate culture. By developing a digital twin of online social networks, the project aims to understand the effects of different platform design choices on the spread of polarizing opinions and (dis)information.

Disinformation campaigns have become a key threat to the political process and social cohesion. The project is therefore dedicated to combating disinformation online in order to make users aware of it and to counteract the social effects of disinformation.

With ASSUME a team of researchers aims to develop a highly modular and easy-to-use energy market simulation toolbox with integrated reinforcement learning methods. Different reinforcement learning algorithms in multi-agent simulations of electricity markets were already tested and have created promising results. This toolbox will enable an agile analysis of market designs and bidding strategies of new actors and emerging market dynamics in our fast changing energy system.

 

Tracking data and models relating to the energy transition is a complex challenge that needs to be addressed anew in every research project. We therefore want to establish a national research data infrastructure that enables data and models to be shared according to the FAIR principle and made available to researchers from science and industry.