Dr Chico Camargo is a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, and at St Benet’s Hall, University of Oxford. His research interests cover the intersection of computational social science, complex systems, data science, cultural evolution, cultural sociology, and information theory.
Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in Data Science at the OII, developing and applying new computational and quantitative methods for the social sciences, focusing on the dynamics of public opinion, political volatility, agenda setting and human mobility, and on the analysis of large-scale datasets.
Chico graduated with a BSc from the University of São Paulo, as part of the Molecular Sciences Programme, and later worked in mathematical modelling in biology at the Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology, and at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. He then moved to a PhD (DPhil) in systems biology, also at Oxford, as a Clarendon Scholar in Brasenose College. In his PhD research, he used tools from complex systems and machine learning to investigate the physical principles that rule biological evolution.
You might also find Chico writing for Huffpost Brasil or for The Conversation, or making videos at BláBláLogia, an award-winning Portuguese-speaking science channel on YouTube, which is also a part of Science Vlogs Brasil.
Computational social science, social data science, applications of machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), public opinion dynamics, complex systems, collective behaviour, cultural evolution, digital humanities, algorithmic information theory.
This project seeks to measure and explain what societal issues are given the highest priorities by media organizations, policy makers, and the general public in different nations and languages of the European Union.
This project seeks to use social media data to enhance our understanding of ‘playful’ behaviour across Oxford’s gardens, libraries, and museums, looking for new types of visitor engagement.
This project seeks to utilise newly available data to help urban policy makers improve transport infrastructure to cope with growing and increasingly mobile populations.
My work has been financially supported by the Volkswagen foundation, the Oxford IT Innovation Challenges Panel, and by Lloyd’s Register Foundation and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) via the Alan Turing Institute.
9 November 2021
New analysis proposes new metrics for measuring volatility in political systems and subsequent changes in public opinion.
2 August 2021
An ‘infodemic’, the claim goes, threatens to undermine responses to the pandemic and, ultimately, vaccination efforts. But the term ‘infodemic’ itself is not backed up by science, and its use can potentially do more harm than good.
6 March 2020
6 November 2019
