Workshop on crisis early warning at the KompZ KFE with Prof. Dr. Nils Weidmann

24 June 2022

On June 22, 2022, Prof. Nils Weidmann visited us at the Center for Crisis Early Warning (KompZ KFE) for a workshop on the challenges and opportunities of crisis early warning. In the workshop, Prof. Weidmann provided interesting insights into how research on crisis early warning has progressed in recent years. In particular, the discussion focused on potential biases in different datasets used for crisis early warning. In addition, Prof. Weidmann presented the main findings from his book "The Internet and Political Protest in Autocracies", focusing on the question whether the Internet contributes to the mobilization or suppression of political protesters in autocracies. From the KompZ KFE team, Dr. Vanessa Gottwick and Daniel Mittermaier presented their ongoing research on the prediction of communal conflicts taking into account climate factors. Julian Walterskirchen presented a new approach for the creation of an objective conflict dictionary (OCoDi) by a Deep Neural Network that can infer conflict trends from documents/news articles.