Vitae

You may want to check my research on algorithmic fairness and crisis informatics.

Bio (in 3rd person, feel free to copy-paste)

Very short version

Carlos Castillo (they/them) is an ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, where they lead the Web Science and Social Computing research group. Their background is information retrieval, and currently they focus on algorithmic fairness and crisis informatics.
Mastodon: @chato@tech.lgbt / Twitter: @ChaToX / Website: www.chato.cl

Short version

Carlos Castillo (they/them) is an ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, where they lead the Web Science and Social Computing research group. They are a web miner with a background in information retrieval and have been influential in the areas of crisis informatics, web content quality and credibility, and adversarial web search. They are a prolific, highly cited researcher who has co-authored over 110 publications in top-tier international conferences and journals, receiving two test-of-time awards, five best paper awards, and two best student paper awards. Their works include a book on Big Crisis Data, as well as monographs on Information and Influence Propagation, and Adversarial Web Search.
Mastodon: @chato@tech.lgbt / Twitter: @ChaToX / Website: www.chato.cl

Long version

Carlos Castillo (they/them) is an ICREA Research Professor at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, where they lead the Web Science and Social Computing research group. They are a web miner with a background in information retrieval and have been influential in the areas of crisis informatics, web content quality and credibility, and adversarial web search. They are a prolific, highly cited researcher who have co-authored over 110 publications in top-tier international conferences and journals, receiving two test-of-time awards, five best paper awards, and two best student paper awards. Their works include a book on Big Crisis Data, as well as monographs on Information and Influence Propagation, and Adversarial Web Search.

Carlos received their Ph.D from the University of Chile (2004), and was a visiting scientist at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (2005) and Sapienza Universitá di Roma (2006) before working as a scientist and senior scientist at Yahoo! Research (2006-2012), as a senior scientist and principal scientist at Qatar Computing Research Institute (2012-2015), and as director of research for data science at Eurecat (2016-2017).

They have served in the Program Committee (PC) or Senior PC (SPC) of all major conferences in their area (WWW, WSDM, SIGIR, KDD, CIKM, etc.), and participate in the editorial committee of ACM Transactions on the Web. They were part of the Executive Committee of FAccT until 2023, General Co-Chair of ACM FAT*2020, ACM Digital Health 2016-2018 and Program Committee Co-Chair of TheWebConf 2023 and WSDM 2014; co-organized the Adversarial Information Retrieval Workshop and Web Spam Challenge in 2007 and 2008, the ECML/PKDD Discovery Challenge in 2010 and 2014, the Web Quality Workshop from 2011 to 2014, and the Social Web for Disaster Management Workshop in 2015, 2016, and 2018. They are an ACM Distinguished Member and an IEEE Senior Member.

Mastodon: @chato@tech.lgbt / Twitter: @ChaToX / Website: www.chato.cl

Past and Present Affiliations

Graduates

PhD and MSc students advised or co-advised. Most recent graduate first.

PhD students

  • Dr. Marzieh Karimi-Haghighi (PhD 2023 UPF — Advisor C. Castillo)
    "Risk Assessment in Complex Data Settings: Algorithmic Fairness and Causal Inference"
  • Dr. Lorenzo Porcaro (PhD 2022 UPF — Advisors E. Gomez and C. Castillo)
    "Assessing the Impact of Music Recommendation Diversity on Listeners"
  • Dr. Francesco Fabbri (PhD 2022 UPF — Advisors F. Bonchi and C. Castillo)
    "Algorithmic Bias in Graph-Based Recommender Systems"
  • Dr. David Solans (PhD 2022 UPF — Advisors C. Castillo and C. Calsamiglia)
    "Algorithmic Fairness in Practice: Data, Models and Interaction"
  • Dr. Valerio Lorini (PhD 2022 UPF — Advisor C. Castillo)
    "Social Media Analysis for Situational Awareness and Impact Assessment in Flood Risk Management"
  • Dr. Panayiotis Smeros, (PhD 2022 EPFL — Advisors Karl Aberer and C. Castillo)
    "Combating Online Scientific Misinformation"
  • Dr. Meike Zehlike (PhD 2022 HU Berlin — Advisors Ulf Lesser and C. Castillo)
    "Fairness in Rankings"
  • Dr. Julia Proskurnia (PhD 2017 EPFL — Advisors Karl Aberer and C. Castillo)
    " Profiling, Modelling and Facilitating Online Activism"
  • Dr. Alexandra Olteanu (PhD 2016 EPFL — Advisors Karl Aberer and C. Castillo)
    "Probing the Limits of Social Data: Biases, Methods, and Domain Knowledge"

MSc students

  • Clothilde Breger (MSc 2020 — Advisors David Solans and C. Castillo), UPF
  • Aideen Farrell (MSc 2020), UPF
  • Sara Galindo (MSc 2019), UPF

Current (Co-)Advisees

Graduate students in computer science, unless noted otherwise. Alphabetical order.

  • Giorgio Barnabò, (PhD student), Sapienza University of Rome; co-supervised with Stefano Leonardi
  • Karma Peiró, (PhD in Communication student), UPF; co-supervised with Ruth Rodriguez
  • Yasmina Soto, (PhD in Law student), Universitat de Barcelona; co-supervised with Mónica Navarro
  • Fedor Vitiugin, (PhD student), UPF

Former Interns

I'm proud to have mentored students during short stays or internships:

  • Ludovico Boratto, then at Univ. Cagliari, Italy
  • Soudip Chowdhoury, then at Univ. Trento, Italy
  • Claudio Corsi, then at Univ. Pisa, Italy
  • Aditi Gupta, then at IIITD, India
  • Dino Ienco, then at Univ. Torino, Italy
  • Muhammad Imran, then at Univ. Trento, Italy
  • Janette Lehman, then at Univ. Pompeu Fabra, Catalonia-Spain [testimonial]
  • Arpit Merchant, then at Univ. Helsinki, Finland
  • Michael Mathioudakis, then at Toronto Univ., Canada
  • Michalis Potamias, then at Boston Univ., USA
  • Hemant Purohit, then at Kno.e.sis, USA
  • Jacob Ratkiewicz, then at Indiana Univ., USA
  • Jakob Rogstadious, then at Univ. Madeira, Portugal
  • Eduardo J. Ruiz, then at Univ. of California Riverside, USA
  • Diego Sáez Trumper, then at Univ. Pompeu Fabra, Catalonia-Spain
  • Ilija Subasic, then at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
  • Robert West, then at Stanford, USA

More Collaborators

I've been fortunate to co-author with great colleagues including: