Pablo Aragón is a research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation, where he focuses on knowledge integrity and resilience to disinformation in Wikipedia and sister projects. He is interested in computational social science and social computing through interdisciplinary and participatory approaches to enhance collaboration and deliberation in online platforms, including civic technologies and social media. His research has been published in top-tier international conferences and journals, and featured in international media like the MIT Technology Review, The Atlantic, BBC News, The Guardian and VICE Magazine and Business Insider. He is also an adjunct professor of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Pablo actively contributes to technopolitical projects and served as a foundational board member of Decidim, the free open source platform for participatory democracy.
Pablo was a doctoral researcher of the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning research group at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (2015-2019) and held a visiting appointment at the Oxford Internet Institute - University of Oxford (2018). He worked as a research scientist at Eurecat (2015-2021) and as a research engineer at Barcelona Media (2011-2015). These positions led him to contribute to multiple EU-funded research projects like DECODE, implementing a technopolitical framework around data commons and data sovereignty; or D-CENT, developing distributed and privacy-aware free open source tools for direct democracy. Pablo coordinated the Data Analysis for Citizen Participation project at Medialab Prado, and co-founded the Democratic Innovation Lab of Barcelona City Council and the DatAnalysis15M research network. Prior to his research career, he worked as a data engineer at a social media monitoring startup.
Pablo holds a PhD in Information and Communication Technologies, awarded with mention Cum Laude, from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (2019). He obtained a MSc in Artificial Intelligence at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia – UNED (2016) and a BSc+MSc in Computer Science & Engineering at Universidad de Zaragoza (2010), which included a full year as an exchange student at Luleå Tekniska Universitet. Pablo also attended the 1st Summer School on Methods for Computational Social Science and the 1st Summer School of the Network of Excellence in Internet Science.
ℹ️ More information about research activities on the personal website and the MetaWiki user page.
News
- Talk on Wikimedia Research en la era de la Inteligencia Artificial at III Jornadas de Cultura Libre (21/03/2024)
- Article on Configurations of Digital Participatory Budgeting at ACM TOCHI (05/02/2023)
- Article on A Comparative Study of Reference Reliability in Multiple Language Editions of Wikipedia at CIKM2023 (21/10/2023)
- Panel on Ethical Challenges to the Democratisation of Artificial Intelligence at Decidim Fest 2023 (19/10/2023)
- Talk on Multilingual approaches to support knowledge integrity in Wikipedia at the Wikimedia Research Showcase (19/07/2023)
- Talk on Controversies over Historical Revisionism in Japanese Wikipedia at The Weaponization of Knowledge Conference (11-14/07/2023)
- Panel on The Sociopolitical Impact of AI at the Digital Humanism Summit on AI and Democratic Sustainability (03/07/2023)
- Panel on Applied Computational Social Sciences at the 18th International Conference on Internet, Law and Politics (15/06/2023)
- Organization of the developer track of Wiki Workshop 2023 (11/05/2023)
- Seminar on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning methods to characterize online participation in civic technologies at IIM Visakhapatnam (20/04/2023).
- Seminar on Configurations of Digital Participatory Budgeting at Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3-UOC) (12/04/2023).
- Seminar on Participación y deliberación en tecnologías cívicas at Instituto de Estudios Sociales Avanzados (IESA-CSIC) (10/03/2023)
- Panel on A bullshit-free Internet: strategies against disinformation at Decidim Fest 2022 (13/10/2022)
- Dagstuhl Seminar on Challenges and Opportunities of Democracy in the Digital Society (4-9/09/2022)
- Article on Civic Code for Social Change: Lessons in Civic Tech Grassroots for Software Engineers at IEEE Software (01/06/2022)
- Panel on Reclaiming our Utopia for a future with Open Knowledge at its core at the Open Knowledge Symposium (12/05/2022)
- Seminar on Characterizing Online Participation in Civic Technologies at the Learning Planet Institute (07/02/2022)
- Keynote on A preliminary approach to knowledge integrity risk assessment in Wikipedia projects at InDICEs Bootcamp (23/11/2021)
- Keynote on Decidim: Technopolitical Networks for Participatory Democracy at ICT4Good/Asia Workshop (17/11/2021)
- Panel on Decidim and participatory citizen science at Decidim Fest 2021 (22/10/2021)
- Article on A preliminary approach to knowledge integrity risk assessment in Wikipedia projects at MIS2 KDD workshop (15/08/2021)
- Session on Indicators for the Wikimedia Projects at Wikimania 2021 (15/08/2021)
- Panel at I Encuentro wikimedista sobre lucha contra la desinformación en Wikipedia en español (25/06/2021)
- Best reviewer award at ICWSM-21 (10/06/2021) ?
- Talk on The Impact of Rankings on Online Petition Signing at Data Justice Conference (20/05/2021)
- Article on Unveiling Women’s Needs and Expectations as Users of Bike Sharing Services at Sustainability (07/05/2021)
- Article on Emergency education effects on teacher abilities and motivation to use digital technologies at the British Journal of Educational Technology (01/05/2021)
- Chapter on Assessing the Level of Accessibility of Railway Public Transport for Women Passengers Using Location-Based Data at the Green Energy and Technology book (23/03/2021)
- New position of research scientist at Wikimedia Foundation (01/02/2021)
- DCI Panel on Online Participation and Democracies at University of Toronto (29/01/2021)
- Panel on Participation by Design at Decidim Fest 2020 (18-20/11/2020)
- Organization of the workshop in Civic Technologies: Research, Practice, and Open Challenges at CSCW 2020 (17/10/2020)
- Talk on Citizen Data for the Common Good via Decidim at inDICEs project (29/09/2020)
- First Open Call Workshop of MediaFutures (23/09/2020)
- Keynote on City governance in the Network society at Technopolitics in Urban Regeneration (14/09/2020)
- Panel on Can Digital Citizens Save Democracy? at GovTech Week_ (10/09/2020)
- Mediafutures kick off meeting (7-8/09/2020)
- Meeting of the NGI Forward Advisory Board (22/07/2020)
- Invited lecture on Ciencia de datos para la participación ciudadana at Universidad de Zaragoza (23/04/2020)
- Research seminar on Generative models of discussion threads at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (03/03/2020)
- Presentation of BarcelonaNow pilot at the DECODE project final review (20/02/2020)
- PhD thesis Characterizing Online Participation in Civic Technologies defended and awarded with the mention "Cum Laude" (22/11/2019) ?
- Talk on BarcelonaNow at Smart Citiy Expo World Congress (19/11/2019)
- Talk and tutorial on BarcelonaNow at DECODE symposium: Our Data Our Future (05/11/2019)
- Panel on Frontiers of democratic research at Decidim Fest 2019 (31/10/2019)
- Finalist for the Big Data Talent Awards: Category II - doctoral thesis (17/10/2019)
- PhD thesis Characterizing Online Participation in Civic Technologies submitted to the UPF Postgraduate and Doctorate Academic Committe (26/09/2019)
- Poster on Deliberative Platform Design: The Case of Decidim Barcelona at EuroCSS (04/09/2019)
- Winner of the EuroCSS Science Slam (02/09/2019) ?
- Invited lecture on Ciencia de datos para el bien común at Medialab - Universidad de Granada (24/06/2019)
- Best reviewer award at ICWSM-19 (12/06/2019) ?
- Tutorial on Generative models of discussion threads at ICWSM-19 (11/06/2019)
- Invited talk on Decidim at the XVII Congrés d’Arxivística de Catalunya (09/05/2019)
- Invited workshop and panel on Decidim at PDF CEE 2019 (04-06/04/2019)
- Talk on Decidim at TICTeC 2019 (20/03/2019)
- Invited lecture on Ciencia de datos para la participación ciudadana at Universidad de Zaragoza (21/02/2019)
- Invited lecture on The impact of platform settings on online petition signing at The Europaeum Scholars Programme (16/01/2019)
Office: 55.307
Department of Information and Communication Technologies
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Tànger, 122-140
08018 Barcelona
935 421 497