Ingmar Weber

Educator/Teacher, Scientist

Ingmar Weber is an Alexander von Humboldt Professor for AI at Saarland University where he holds the chair for Societal Computing. His interdisciplinary research comprises (i) computing of society, i.e. the measurement of different social phenomena, in particular using non-traditional data sources, and (ii) computing for society, i.e. working with partners on implementing solutions to help address societal challenges. Analyses performed by his team and collaborators have been used in displacements contexts ranging from Venezuela to Ukraine. Prior to joining Saarland University, Ingmar was the Research Director for Social Computing at the Qatar Computing Research Institute. He studied mathematics at the University of Cambridge before pursuing a Ph.D. at the Max-Planck Institute for Computer Science.

... studying how new forms of data and AI can be used to (i) study societal phenomena, and to (ii) support social development.

Advertising data can be used for good. In our research, we tap into the advertising platforms of Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and others to advance our understanding on topics such as (i) international migration, (ii) digital gender gaps, or (iii) wealth inequalities. In a nutshell, all targeted advertising platforms provide potential advertisers with "audience estimates", i.e. estimates of how many of their users match certain criteria. The targeting criteria can include (i) country of origin, (ii) gender, (iii) device type, or many other attributes. These audience estimates provide a real-time, digital census over the users of Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and other platforms. In our research, we show that such data can augment existing, traditional data sources to fill data gaps on a range of issues. For details and peer-reviewed articles see https://ingmarweber.de/publications/.

Computational Social Science, Digital Demography, Non-Traditional Data Sources, Societal Computing, Web Science