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Max Noichl

Hi, I’m Max Noichl! I’m doing a PhD at Utrecht University, where I work in the borderlands between philosophy, computational social science, and digital humanities. I’m advised by Dominik Klein and Erik Stei at the department of theoretical philosophy.

My research explores how foundation models/AI represent the structures which we collectively rely on to make sense of the social world, and how they can become useful tools to understand social processes. This includes work in philosophy of machine learning, e.g. dimensionality reduction & clustering—How can we get hold of these structures in latent space?—in computational social science—Can we run theoretical models of social processes (polarisation, innovation,…), e.g. agent based models, within the structures learned by a language-model?—and in digital humanities—Can we use LLMs to trace the developments of ideas and build data-driven intuitions about macro-processes of science and intellectual history?

In earlier, but ongoing, collaborations I also worked with Johannes Marx on a computational model for collective agency at the University of Bamberg, and Tarja Knuuttila and Andrea Loettgers on computational approaches to the investigation of model transfer at the University of Vienna.

When I’m not working, I play with AI art, make food, or do a little climbing. Some of my side projects can be found under the projects header above. Most are somewhat data-sciency; some also contain philosophy.

As a side job, I also sometimes consult on bibliometric and data science/visualization projects, for example for the European University Institute or the Sozium Bremen. If you have a project of that kind in mind, please feel free to get in touch!

The sketch of my face is by Veronika Szücs.

news
Jan 29, 2025 I’ll present work on how to get empirically validated ABMs of scientific discovery to work at the “Formal Models of Scientific Inquiry” workshop in Bochum, 29-31st of January, 2025.
Oct 12, 2024 I’ll be visiting the Institute for Complex Social Dynamics at CMU until mid-November.
Sep 11, 2024 I’ll be giving a talk on philosophy of unsupervised learning at the PhilML24
Aug 22, 2024 Together with Gareth Pearce and Charles Pence I’m giving a talk on how to digitally model the history of philosophy mathematics in Tilburg.
Jun 18, 2024 Together with Andrea Loettgers and Rona Aviram I’ll be giving talk at a Workshop on Scientific Understanding and Representation at LSE (online)
selected papers
  1. formula_umap.png
    formula_umap.png
    How Localized Are Computational Templates? A Machine Learning Approach
    Maximilian Noichl
    Synthese, Mar 2023
  2. modelling_recent_phil.png
    modelling_recent_phil.png
    Modeling the Structure of Recent Philosophy
    Maximilian Noichl
    Synthese, Jun 2021