William Schueller 

Date/Time: 19.03.2025, 12:00

Location: D2.2.094 

Abstract 

Open Source Software is everywhere: from our phones to our cars, behind our banks and health systems, and even on Mars. Last but not least, even the production of scientific knowledge is relying increasingly on Open Source Software! It is the backbone of our digital economy, and more than often relies on overwhelmed volunteers. This weakness can cascade to costly catastrophes, observed in many real events. Identifying vulnerable points in this rapidly growing network of interdependencies is highly relevant from a complex systems perspective: many interdisciplinary aspects, critical relevance for society and detailed multi-layered network data of high quality. I will introduce the available data and how to gather it, a first model of systemic risk in those ecosystems, but also insist on the risks to be aware of when using/developing software for science. 

Bio 

William Schueller is an IT technician/DevOps engineer in the Comp3D team at UniWien, since March 2025. Until mid-2024, William was a PostDoc at the Complexity Science Hub, studying systemic risk in the food supply chain of Austria and in Open Source Software ecosystems. He had responsibilities in several projects as a data/software engineer, and IT system administration. William studied physics at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, with a master’s thesis focusing on ant behavior models. After teaching maths and physics for two years at Galatasaray University in Istanbul, Turkey, William did his PhD in computer science at Inria Bordeaux, France, including an extended stay at Universita Sapienza di Roma to work with Vittorio Loreto. In his PhD, William introduced active learning mechanisms in multi-agent models, and showed that they can represent a key feature in controlling local complexity growth. A small user experiment in the form of an online game showed that human behavior may follow such rules. William’s research interests include language evolution, supply chain networks and collaboration networks in software engineering. William has a strong focus on improving reproducibility of science via the promotion of good coding habits and open-source.