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Lunch Pitch with Christopher Blöcker and Timotheus Kampik: Public Transport Networks and  Persuasive Technologies


Time: Tuesday 8 January at 12:00.

Sign up here for a free sandwich before Monday 7 January 10:00! 

First Pitcher:

Christopher Blöcker

PhD student at Department of Physics

Title: Dynamic Public Transport Networks in Smart Cities

Christopher is a PhD student in computational science at IceLab at the Department of Physics and enrolled in the WASP Graduate School (Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program). His background is in computer science where I focused on functional programming and programming language design. Christopher has collected some experience in applied machine learning when he worked as a researcher in the field of bioinformatics in Singapore. In his PhD studies, he’s looking at problems in network science which are connected to community detection and link prediction.


Smart city initiatives are emerging in several countries and one part of their vision is to improve the efficiency and user-friendliness of public transport networks. Common approaches include, e.g., smart traffic lights to give priority to buses and real-time trip planning to minimise travel times, given the current position of buses and trains. My idea is to take this even one step further and to move away from the concept of static lines. Instead, we could re-configure lines dynamically as needed and provide relevant connections to passengers throughout the day.

Can we use network science to find out what connections are needed? Would this improve efficiency? And what kind of data do we need to answer these questions?


Second Pitcher:

Timotheus Kampik

PhD Student at Department of Computing Science

Title: Coercion and Deception in Persuasive Technologies

Timotheus is a PhD student at the Department of Computing Science working at the intersection of multi-agent systems, human-computer interaction, and societal implications of information systems. The key topics of his current research are coercion and deception in persuasive technology and empathic autonomous agents. He has a background in software engineering, with a focus on designing and implementing business process and business decision management systems. As part of his PhD, Timotheus is enrolled in the WASP Graduate School (Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program).


Technologies that shape human behavior are of high societal relevance, both when considering their current impact and their future potential. In his presentation, Timotheus explains how complex information systems are increasingly effective in deceiving and coercing users and discusses the societal implications of such manipulative persuasive technologies.

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