- Social media and network analysis
- Citizen science and crowdsourcing
- Artificial intelligence
- Data science
- Computational social science
- Crisis informatics (environmental emergencies)
- Science communication
Stefan Daume’s research explores connections between digital technologies and sustainability, with particular focus on the promises and risks of social media for public engagement with environmental challenges
Daume is currently exploring how to detect, describe and counter environmental mis- and disinformation in online social media. His work, together with Victor Galaz, aims to understand how the spread of online misinformation impacts our ability to respond effectively to environmental emergencies like forest fires, and how it influences the long-term public perception of climate change and environmental challenges in general.
Currently, Daume’s research primarily utilises large Twitter data sets and employs a broad range of data science tools including social network analysis, text mining and machine learning.
He is also contributing to the programme Governance, Technology and Complexity at the Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics. Here, his focus is on the role of AI, intelligent autonomous systems and social media in the complex interactions between social systems and the biosphere.
Daume holds a degree in Forest Sciences (University of Goettingen) and an MSc in Artificial Intelligence (The University of Edinburgh). After a decade as a software developer, entrepreneur and open source contributor in several IT start-ups he returned to academia and completed a PhD focusing on the potential of social online media as a crowdsourcing tool for environmental monitoring.
Prior experiences also include work for the Swedish node of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and the bioinformatics group at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, where he helped to develop tools and strategies for the digitisation of natural history collections.
Key publications
EATLancet vs yes2meat: the digital backlash to the planetary health diet. Garcia, D., Galaz, V., Daume, S. The Lancet, Volume 394, Issue 10215, 2153 - 2154. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(19)32526-7
Daume S., Galaz V. 2016. “Anyone Know What Species This Is?” – Twitter Conversations as Embryonic Citizen Science Communities. PLOS ONE 11(3): e0151387. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0151387
Daume, S. 2016. Mining Twitter to monitor invasive alien species — An analytical framework and sample information topologies, Ecological Informatics, Volume 31, Pages 70-82, ISSN 1574-9541,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2015.11.014
Daume, S., Albert, M., von Gadow, K. 2014. Forest monitoring and social media – Complementary data sources for ecosystem surveillance?, Forest Ecology and Management, Volume 316, Pages 9-20, ISSN 0378-1127, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2013.09.004
Daume, S., Albert, M. & von Gadow, K. Assessing citizen science opportunities in forest monitoring using probabilistic topic modelling. For. Ecosyst. 1, 11 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40663-014-0011-6