Max is a cognitive scientist (University of Vienna, Austria and University of Ljubljana, Slovenia). He was a doctoral researcher in Computational Social Science affiliated to the Complexity Science Hub and Medical University of Vienna in the WWTF research group “Emotional Well-Being in the Digital Society” led by David Garcia.

His PhD research in the thematic programme “Medical Informatics, Biostatistics and Complex Systems” focused on analyzing the digital traces of individual and collective emotional behavior and affective expression on social media. After receiving his PhD, he worked in industry as Assistant Researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratories Rome. He was Assistant Professor at the Chair for Data Science in the Economic and Social Sciences at University of Mannheim and interim Professor for Social and Behavioural Data Science at University of Konstanz.

Currently, he is a Principal Investigator at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, where he leads a research group. His track record includes publications at top venues (including Scientific Reports, ACL, EACL, ICWSM, EPJ Data Science, Perspectives on Psychological Science, World Happiness Report) and competitive research funding.

He uses traditional and novel interdisciplinary computational methods from data science and Natural Language Processing to study behavior of large language models in game-theoretic settings, AI Psychometrics, semantic embeddings as complements to human ratings, synthetic surveys, emotional well-being measured from textual data, polarization and other phenomena at the intersection of AI and the social sciences.