Zoé Christoff

Zoé Christoff is an Assistant Professor in Cognitive Artificial Intelligence and Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the Bernoulli Institute for Mathematics, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence of the University of Groningen. She joined the university in September 2020 and is a member of the Multi-Agent Systems Group. Her interdisciplinary work bridges humanities and sciences, focusing on formal models of social phenomena.

Christoff earned her PhD at the University of Amsterdam under the supervision of Johan van Benthem and Sonja Smets at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC). Prior to that, she completed her MA at the University of Geneva under Pascal Engel, Fabrice Correia and Kevin Mulligan. Her academic journey includes postdoctoral positions at the University of Bayreuth (Germany) and the University of Liverpool.

Her research centers on collective intelligence, exploring how groups of agents can act smart or dumb together. She investigates opinion formation, collective decision-making, and social influence using formal tools from logic, artificial intelligence, social network theory, social epistemology, and social choice theory. Her work examines how social networks distort information and how logical tools can model social network dynamics, including similarity-based processes like social influence and link changes. Christoff is particularly interested in understanding patterns and laws governing information dynamics and social network phenomena, with applications to democratic institutions and misinformation.

Her recent publications reveal a strong focus on the intersection of logic, network theory, and social phenomena. Key trends include investigating majority illusions in social networks, modeling opinion diffusion in similarity-driven networks, analyzing voting systems, and developing dynamic logics for network changes. Her work consistently applies formal mathematical approaches to understand complex social dynamics, with particular attention to how network structures constrain information flow and collective behavior.

• NWO VENI grant for research project 'Democracy on Social Networks'
• Rosalind Franklin Fellow

Christoff leads research on collective intelligence and has established a collaborative working environment that values work-life balance. Her NWO VENI grant supports her research on democracy in the context of social networks. She emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary approaches that don't force a choice between humanities and sciences, maintaining that the most interesting questions often lie at their intersection.

As a member of the Multi-Agent Systems Group at the Bernoulli Institute, Christoff contributes to a research environment focused on formal models of social phenomena. Her work on information dynamics in social networks has implications for understanding collective intelligence, democratic processes, and the impact of social media on society.