Pablo Aragón is a research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation, where he focuses on content integrity and resilience to disinformation in Wikipedia and other free knowledge projects. He is interested in computational social science and social computing through interdisciplinary and participatory approaches to characterize and facilitate participation, deliberation and collaboration 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, The Guardian and VICE Magazine. He is also an adjunct professor of the Department of Information and Communication Technologies at Universitat Pompeu Fabra and ELISAVA Barcelona School of Design and Engineering. Pablo actively contributes to projects at the intersection of data, technology and democracy, and serves as a 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 also 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.

News

• New position of research scientist at Wikimedia Foundation (01/02/2021)
• DCI Panel about Online Participation and Democracies at University of Toronto (29/01/2021)
• Organization of 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 about Citizen Data for the Common Good via Decidim at inDICEs project (29/09/2020)
• First Open Call Workshop of MediaFutures (23/09/2020)
• Keynote about City governance in the Network society at Technopolitics in Urban Regeneration (14/09/2020)
• Panel about 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 together with Vicenç Gómez and Andreas Kaltenbrunner (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 about BarcelonaNow at Smart Citiy Expo World Congress (19/11/2019)
• Talk and tutorial about BarcelonaNow at DECODE symposium: Our Data Our Future (05/11/2019)
• Panel about 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 about 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 together with Vicenç Gómez and Andreas Kaltenbrunner (11/06/2019)
• Invited talk about Decidim at the XVII Congrés d’Arxivística de Catalunya (09/05/2019)
• Invited workshop and panel about Decidim at PDF CEE 2019 (04-06/04/2019)
• Talk about 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)