Klaus G. Troitzsch

Klaus G. Troitzsch has been a full professor of computer applications in the social sciences at the University of Koblenz-Landau since 1986. He was born in Lahstedt-Oberg, Lower Saxony, Germany, on 28 November 1946, spent most of his school time in Mülheim an der Ruhr, North-Rhine-Westphalia, and started a sociology programme at the University of Cologne in 1965. After a three years' military service he continued his studies at the University of Hamburg where he took his first degree as a political scientist. From 1972 to 1974 he served as an assistant to the Liberal Party Group in the Parliament of Hamburg and was a member of this Parliament from 1974 to 1978 where he also acted as Chief Whip of the Liberal Party Group. In 1979, after having taken his PhD in political science from the University of Hamburg, he returned to academia, first as a senior researcher in an election research project at the Institute of Political Science of the University of Koblenz-Landau, from 1986, after having passed the "Habilitation" at Koblenz, as full professor of computer applications in the social sciences. In 1990 he moved to the Faculty of Computer Science and its Institute of Computer Applications in the Social Sciences. He served his university as dean (1987 to 1992) and vice-dean (1992 to 2000) of the Faculty of Computer Science and as head of the Information Systems Institute (Institut für Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungsinformatik) since 2001. His main interests in teaching and research are social science methodology and, especially, modelling and simulation in the social sciences. He was among the founders of the Research Committee on Modelling and Simulation of the German Sociological Association and served it as chair and vice-chair for nearly a decade. He was also among the founders of the SimSoc Consortium which organises conferences in social simulation and publishes the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS, now in its eighth year), of which he is the Forum Editor. He was also among the signatories of the European Social Simulation Association (ESSA) and acts as its treasurer and webmaster. Among his main research projects there is the MIMOSE project (funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft between 1988 and 1992) which has developed a simulation tool for micro and multilevel simulation since 1986. From 1996 to 2002 he was involved in an international project (funded by the European Union in its TACIS/TEMPUS programme) devoted to implement simulation and Internet courses for the social sciences (together with Nigel Gilbert, University of Surrey, Guildford, England, and Serge Chernyshenko, Dnipropetrovs'k National University, Dnipropetrovs'k, Ukraine) during which he organised a series of summer schools in social science methodology and, especially, social simulation, for international participants. Annual summer and spring courses in social simulation continue to be offered in close co-operation with Nigel Gilbert and ZUMA, the Mannheim-based Centre for Survey Research and Methodology. From 2000 to 2003 he was also involved in an EU Fifth Framework funded international research project named Freshwater Integrated Resources Management with Agents (FIRMA) where his team was, among others, responsible for the simulation aspects. Moreover he was involved in another TEMPUS/TACIS project with partners in Russia, Ukraine, Spain, Italy, Slovakia and Germany which is devoted to foster System Modernisation of University Management (the name of the project) and in a Leonardo da Vinci project fostering the introduction of simulation into Latvian study programs. Simulation was also at the core of a DFG funded project devoted to analysing traffic route decisons and in a microsimulation project which analysed mating and marriage between the different ethnic groups in New Zealand. Currently he is involved in an EU Sixth Framework project called EMIL --- Emergence in the Loop ---, which is devoted to analyse, model and simulate the processes by which norms emergence in social groups. In this project his group is responsible for building the simulator and designing an agent architecture that allows agents to consider, adopt, discuss and defend norms. He is author, co-author, and co-editor of a number of books on simulation, author of a number of articles in social simulation, and he organised or co-organised a number of national and international conferences in social simulation.

Postfach 201 602
D-56016 Koblenz
Germany
Germany

Email: kgt@uni-koblenz.de
Web: http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~kgt