Bence Kollanyi

Bence Kollanyi is currently a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Corvinus University of Budapest.
His research interest is the role of technology in social and economic change. He has a strong background in sociology, and he has recently graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology with an MS in Public Policy. During his studies at Georgia Tech, he started doing research related to social media and computational propaganda. Most recently, he has worked together with Professor Hans K. Klein and two computer scientists, Wenke Lee and Nick Feamster, on a project about information manipulation on the internet. He was a member of Michael Best’s Technologies and International Development lab, also at Georgia Tech, where his research was ranging from studying computer sharing and collaboration in Ghanian cyber cafés to analyzing data from social media reports about various African elections. His thesis looks at the changes of development policy in public internet access. Related to this project, he has spent a semester at TASCHA (Technology & Social Change Group) at the University of Washington exploring their large scale survey data in this area.

Before moving to the United States, Bence worked as a researcher at ITTK (Information Society and Trend Research Institute) at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. There he was leading a research project on the role of community in gaining ICT skills in a government funded program providing wireless internet and computers to disadvantaged Roma families in rural Hungary.