César A. Hidalgo

Founder, Datawheel | Professor, Toulouse School of Economics | Director, Center for Collective Learning | Author, "Why Information Grows" and "How Humans Judge Machines"
Twitter iconFacebook iconInstagram iconYoutube icon
César Hidalgo is an interdisciplinary data scientist known for his creative use of data to tackle questions at the intersection of economic development, data visualization, and applied artificial intelligence. With scholarly enthusiasm, César brings to the stage reimagined ideas on economic growth and democracy, offering data-backed insights into fascinating social phenomena such as human bias against machines and the collective memory of a society.
César is a professor at the Toulouse School of Economics and the Director of the Center for Collective Learning, a multidisciplinary research laboratory with offices in Hungary and France. His current research ranges from the reconceptualization of democracy and civic engagement through AI-powered "digital twins," removing the need for politicians, to the development of data-driven international development strategies. His work on democracy discovered the importance of divisiveness metrics, which shed light on the polarizing issues dividing society. His work on economic development provides a nuanced view of the sectoral evolution of economics and its implications to inclusive green growth.
César is the author of three books. His latest, How Humans Judge Machines, presents original research on how and why people judge decisions made by artificial intelligence systems differently than those made by humans. His first book, The Atlas of Complexity, helped establish the concept of economic complexity (introduced by Hidalgo a few years earlier) and its ability to explain future economic growth. Why Information Grows explores the physical nature of economic systems, leveraging some of the ideas explored in Atlas to make the case that a country’s ability to make complex products is directly related to its potential for economic growth. The book has been translated into a dozen languages and was commended by The Economist, The Financial Times, Nature, and by Paul Romer, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economics.
Hidalgo is a founder of Datawheel, an award-winning company specialized in the creation of data distribution and visualization systems. His work with Datawheel has produced tools including The Observatory of Economic Complexity—the most popular tool in the world to visualize international trade data—and national economic observatories such as Data Mexico and DataUSA, the most comprehensive visualization of U.S. public data. His online tools have received hundreds of millions of views and have received multiple design awards, including three Webby Awards and the Information is Beautiful Award. 
César is a recipient of many awards including the Lagrange Prize, the highest award given to a Complex Systems scholar under the age of 50, and was named one of World Summit AI’s Top 50 Innovators. He has written dozens of peer-reviewed papers that have been cited more than 33,000 times and have been featured in top journals, such as Science, Nature, PNAS, and the American Economic Review. He has spoken at over 200 different events including academic conferences, professional events, and art festivals in fields as diverse as data mining, network science, economics, complex systems, data visualization, finance, and computer science, among others.

Topics

Economic Complexity: Using AI for a Nuanced Understanding of Growth

What made the economy of Peru different from that of South Korea in the 1970s? If we look at macroeconomic statistics, both countries looked similar, but these aggregate similarities do not tell us the full story. In the 1970s, the economic structures of Peru and South Korea were quite different, and these differences explain their future divergence in economic growth. In 2009, César Hidalgo published a pioneering mathematical formula quantifying an economy’s productive structure. In the following years, this measure of economic complexity has proven to be a robust predictor of future economic growth, international variations in inequality, and greenhouse gas emissions. Supported by machine learning and artificial intelligence, economic complexity offers a new way of understanding the global market and predicting which countries are going to experience growth and why. In this presentation, Hidalgo explores how governments and businesses can build strategies for growth around incredibly nuanced and specific economic activities that have become measurable thanks to the new language of economic complexity. With data on economic activity for every country, César will tailor this presentation to your region for maximum audience impact.

Show more

Digital Democracy: Removing the Politicians from Politics

People around the world have grown increasingly disillusioned with their governments. Corrupt politicians are more loyal to their deep pocketed funders than the citizens they’re meant to represent. And division across the spectrums of politics, age, gender, race, and other sociodemographic dimensions is at an all-time high. What if we could bypass the bureaucracy of modern politics and vote directly on issues with the support of AI? In this expansive presentation that covers both the conceptualization of digital democracy and real stories of what it looks like in practice, César Hidalgo dives into the changes that would need to happen on the governmental level and in the minds of the citizenry to make this new approach to democracy viable and sustainable. He also shares unexpected findings from grassroots direct democracy experiments that reveal the true sources of division in a society and discusses how this data can best serve democracy.

Show more

How Humans Judge Machines

When a fellow coworker makes a mistake, it might be a pain to correct, but ultimately, we chalk it up to human error. But when a machine that is meant to be infallible errs, who do we blame? Do we perceive the machine’s error as more egregious than the one made by a person? Does our perception change if the machine has more humanlike qualities, such as the ability to plan or to feel? How does morality come into play? Based on his book How Humans Judge Machines and more recent research, César Hidalgo reveals the biases that permeate human-machine interactions. The insights shared in this talk are crucial for understanding how artificial intelligence is to be regulated and governed as AI assumes a greater position in every corner of our daily lives.

Show more

Collective Memory: How Humanity Remembers

Memory is a funny thing. We can remember the lyrics to a song we haven’t heard in a decade but may forget what we ate for lunch yesterday. How does memory work on a larger scale? When and how does a topic that everyone is talking about become a niche interest that only few discuss? Who decides what pieces of culture get passed down to posterity and which fade to obsolescence and are forgotten? In this presentation César Hidalgo shares his research on the laws that govern collective memory, how it decays over time, how the language one speaks affects what we remember, and how collective memory is shaped by technology.

Show more

Videos

Advancing Platforms & Principles for Digital Participation
César A. Hidalgo
Revolutionizing Politics: Embracing Augmented Democracy & Collective Intelligence
César A. Hidalgo
Why Information Grows
César A. Hidalgo
Using Data Fingerprints to Predict the Future | Wired 2014
César A. Hidalgo
Understanding Economic Complexity
César A. Hidalgo
Networks Understanding Networks | MIT
César A. Hidalgo
Meritocracy and Topocracy of Networks
César A. Hidalgo
How the medium shapes the message | TEDxYouth@BeaconStreet
César A. Hidalgo
How Humans Judge Machines | Talks at Google
César A. Hidalgo
Economic Complexity and The Wealth of Nations
César A. Hidalgo
Complexity | TEDxBoston
César A. Hidalgo
A bold idea to replace politicians using AI
César A. Hidalgo

Articles

Newspaper icon
Tomorrow, an augmented society? The assumed bet of César Hidalgo
Exploreur
Newspaper icon
How Humans Judge Machines
Expansional View Podcast | Harvard Business Review
Newspaper icon
The Pitchforks Are Here
Pitchfork Economics Podcast
Newspaper icon
From Famous To Forgotten
Innovation Hub Podcast
Newspaper icon
Information in Societies, Economics, and the Universe
Sean Carroll's Mindscape Podcast
Newspaper icon
How do we forget what was once famous?
The World
Newspaper icon
Pro-network Economics Is Pro-growth Economics: A Review of 'Why Information Grows'
AEI

Podcasts

Testimonials

This speaker does not have any Articles yet.
Book César A. Hidalgo for your event
Request Availability
Download Bio
PDF icon
Artificial Intelligence
Big Data & Data Science
Innovation
Technology
Twitter iconFacebook iconInstagram iconYoutube icon

Related speakers

No related speakers.
By continuing to browse you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. If you do not wish to allow cookies, please see our cookie policy for instructions. Learn more