Dr. Florian Bemmann

Research Interests

• Behavioral data from mobile and ubiquitous devices
• Social and societal implications of information technology, news platforms, and social media
• Human perspectives on technology

Short Description

Florian is a postdoctoral associate for the Competence Center for Data Quality in the Social Sciences project (KODAQS), collaborating with the sociology Department at the School of Social Sciences at the University of Mannheim, as well as with the Chair for Statistics and Data Science in Social Sciences and the Humanities at the Ludwig Maximilian University. Before joining Mannheim Uni, Florian worked in the Media Informatics Group at LMU Munich, researching the social and societal implications of information technologies.

During his PhD in computer science, he worked on privacy aspects of smartphone sensing applications. For five years, he has been the lead developer in the PhoneStudy mobile sensing project, where he developed and administered smartphone sensing infrastructure, collecting behavioral research data from participants in the wild, fueling psychology research with various national and international partner institutions. In his current research, he studies how technology, specifically information systems such as news aggregators and social media platforms, influences people on the social and societal level. He studies paths towards a more societally sustainable design of such systems, which are focused on serving the users' good, rather than representing mainly the platforms' interests.