About the Social and Cognitive Informatics Laboratory

The Social and Cognitive Informatics Laboratory (SCILA), established in November 2019, is the successor of the Laboratory for Internet Studies (LINIS) and builds upon its team and some of its previous research. Its founding international supervisor is Prof. Dr. Steffen Staab, currently Managing Director of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence Analytic Computing at the University of Stuttgart. In 2022, the laboratory international supervisor was Prof. Dr. Reinhold Kliegl, Potsdam University. Currently, the laboratory is headed by Olessia Koltsova.

SCILA’s interdisciplinary team seeks to investigate and model interaction of individual humans and groups with information, knowledge, respective technologies and with other humans using these technologies.  The research strongly relies both on the knowledge from social, behavioral and cognitive sciences and on the cutting-edge approaches from computer science, including machine learning and computational linguistics. As much of information processing happens online, Internet—the previous focus of the Lab’s research—is an integral part of the SCILA’s studies.