The Winter School was held from January 22- January 28, 2018  at Centre for Cognitive Science, IIT Gandhinagar and was delivered by Prof Jorge Louçã. The sessions encapsulated an implementation of diverse of techniques for monitoring public opinion, allowing to analyze the evolution of narratives (chains of concepts and arguments) being propagated in society was very well explored. New quantitative method for discourse analysis adapted for large textual corpus was presented. The method based on network theory, machine learning, natural language processing, and mathematical modeling of multi-level complex systems was employed to understand BREXIT, Immigration Problems, and Cultural Diversity In India. Comprehensive and meaningful discussions and interactions were the primary focus of the analysis of these results.

About Prof Jorge Louçã

Jorge Louçã obtained in 2000 a PhD in informatics from the Université Paris Dauphine, Paris, France and the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon, Portugal. He is, since 2000, professor at the ISCTE-IUL Lisbon University Institute, where he teaches Programming Languages and Complex Systems Science. He is the scientific coordinator of the Master and Doctoral Programmes in Complexity Sciences, joint academic programs from the ISCTE-IUL and the University of Lisbon. He has been at the laboratory LAMSADE – Laboratoire d’Analyse et Modélisation de Systèmes pour l’Aide à la Décision, Université Paris Dauphine, from October 1995 to Mars 1999, and LabMAg – Laboratory of Agent Modelling, University of Lisbon from Mars 1999 to September 2011. He presently develops his research at ISTAR – Information Sciences and Technologies and Architecture Research Center, at ISCTE-IUL. He participated in several European research projects. Jorge Louçã is member of the council of the Complex Systems Society (CSS), and since 2015 Vice-President of the Unesco UniTwin Complex Systems Digital Campus. He is the coordinator of The Observatorium research group, aiming to real-time monitoring of multi-level network structures for the study of knowledge generation and opinion dynamics on the Internet.

Dr Gerd Gigerenzer is the director of the Harding Centre for Risk Literacy and has served as the director of the Centre for Adaptive Behaviour and Cognition of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Well known in the field of decision making as the ideological rival of Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman, his work has been largely devoted to scripting an alternative view of how Humans make decisions in the real world.

Dr Gigerenzer delivered a Public lecture on ‘Simple Heuristics for a Complex world’ at Centre for Cognitive Sciences, IIT Gandhinagar on 11th January, 2018 devoted to the idea of how Humans actually make decisions. In his lecture, Prof Gigerenzer argued for a heuristic based approach to understanding decision making. Considered an ideological rival of Daniel Kahneman, Gigerenzer argued for Heuristics being ‘ecologically rational’ and not recipes for biased decision making. He summarized much of the work he had done with the ABC group and cited how the usage of ‘As If’ models of decision making had failed to predict various Economic events of importance. Gigerenzer called for more risk literacy and informational dissemination to make sure that humans get the right environment for the use of their ‘Fast and Frugal heuristics’.

Gigerenzer called for a different kind of Behavioral economics, one that was not rooted in the biased notion that humans were inherently biased and irrational and which took into accounts the goals and environments of decision makers based on empirical observations and attempted to make sure that humans were aided in this process of decision making.