Keith Burghardt

Complex Systems Summer School 2015 Home Surveys/Evaluations Logistics Payment Instructions Faculty Panel Questions Faculty Publications Lecture Slides Participants Schedule Background Readings Complexity Puns Software Projects & Working Groups Project Group Meeting Schedule Sign Up Sheet for Meetings with Josh Tutorials Project Presentations Final Papers After Hours Restaurant Guide Resource Guide Photos TShirts

Keith Burghardt is a graduate student in physics at the University of Maryland studying dynamics on networks. His current interest is blending cognition and the dynamics of opinion formation with statistical physics.

Currently he is working on the following topics:

• Modeling candidate vote distributions and vote correlations with a realistic and general model (in preparation)
• Modeling the success of Ebola infections and the relative success of Ebola strains in West Africa (2015 CSSS Project)
• Understanding limited the effect of "information overload" and limited cognition with data from Stack Exchange question answering boards (in preparation)
• Modeling the dynamics of opinion formation in small groups with the novel method of time-to-consensus distributions gathered from jury and judicial panel data (in preparation)

Between grad school, hikes in New Mexico, and caring for his two wonderful dogs, he works to understand fundamentally how groups arrive at a decision. Do individuals find agreement from the bare facts, or do individuals instead arrive at a group decision from a complex interplay ideas brought about by a individuals in a diverse group? If so, how can we understand this relationship?

He believes that answers to these questions are being teased out through the papers and thesis he is currently writing.