Pablo Aragón is a research scientist at the Big Data & Data Science unit in Eurecat, Centre Tecnològic de Catalunya and an adjunct professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. His research focuses on understanding social and political phenomena through the analysis of data from the Internet. He is particularly interested in characterizing online participation in civic technologies, the online network structures of grassroots movements and political parties, and the technopolitical dimension of networked democracy. He was also a visiting scholar at the Oxford Internet Institute (University of Oxford) and contributes actively in EU funded research projects like DECODE, free open-source infrastructures to increase data sovereignty of European citizens, or D-CENT, free open-source digital technologies to transform everyday democratic decision making. The results of his research have been published in top-tier journals and conferences in computational social science, where he also serves as reviewer (e.g. PLOS ONE, EPJ Data Science) and member of the program committee (e.g., TheWebConf, ICWSM, IC2S2). He has also given numerous talks and tutorials to academic and industrial audiences at international conferences, universities and research institutions. 

Pablo is a board member of Decidim, the platform for participatory democracy in cities and organizations, and co-founder of the Democratic Innovation Lab of Barcelona and the DatAnalysis15M research network.

News

• 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 (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)