Carlos Alberto Alejandro Castillo Ocaranza

Carlos Castillo is an ICREA Research Professor (Part-time) at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, where they lead the Social and Responsible Computing Research Group within the Department of Information and Communication Technologies. Dr. Castillo identifies as nonbinary and prefers they/them pronouns, and is also a Latinx migrant to Barcelona in Catalunya, Spain.

Dr. Castillo received their Ph.D from the University of Chile in 2004, followed by visiting scientist positions 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).

Dr. Castillo's research addresses issues of social significance through interdisciplinary computer science research, with primary focus on algorithmic fairness, crisis informatics, web content quality and credibility, and adversarial web search. Their work combines technical expertise in information retrieval with deep consideration of social implications, particularly in high-risk applications including criminal justice and recruitment. They have made significant contributions to understanding and mitigating discrimination in algorithmic systems, as evidenced by their book on Big Crisis Data and numerous influential publications.

Recent publications demonstrate a strong emphasis on fairness in algorithmic decision-making, with numerous papers examining bias in hiring algorithms, recidivism prediction systems, and social media content analysis. The research shows an interdisciplinary approach that bridges computer science, social science, and policy considerations, with increasing attention to practical applications and real-world impact across domains including criminal justice, healthcare, education, and music recommendation systems.

Dr. Castillo has received significant recognition for their work:

• Two test-of-time awards
• Four best paper awards
• Two best student paper awards
• ACM Distinguished Member
• IEEE Senior Member
• Accredited at the full professor level in Catalonia

Dr. Castillo has served extensively in academic leadership roles, including as Program Committee or Senior PC member for major conferences (WWW, WSDM, SIGIR, KDD, CIKM), editorial committee member for ACM Transactions on the Web and ACM Transactions in Social Computing, and Executive Committee member of ACM FAccT. They were General Co-Chair of ACM FAccT (formerly FAT*) 2020, PC Co-Chair of ACM Digital Health 2016-2018, and PC Co-Chair of WSDM 2014. Dr. Castillo currently coordinates the Horizon Europe project FINDHR on detecting and mitigating discrimination in algorithmic hiring.

They lead the Social and Responsible Computing Research Group, which takes an interdisciplinary approach to developing computational methods that consider social impact and ethical implications. The group works on projects involving computer scientists, social scientists, and domain experts to address societal challenges through responsible technological innovation, with current focus on algorithmic fairness in high-risk applications, crisis informatics, and understanding social dynamics through computational methods.