2025.01.02: For over two years, I had the privilege of serving as the general co-chair for ACM CSCW 2024, the premier conference in my field, which had never before been hosted in Latin America. In 2024, alongside an incredible team of volunteers from around the globe, we made a bit of history by successfully bringing the conference to San José, Costa Rica, in October. Following this milestone, I co-organized Chile WiC, the Chilean event for women in computing, with my colleagues. This inspiring gathering took place in November in Santiago, Chile.
2024.10.15: In recent months, I’ve had the privilege of presenting two fantastic books, authored by two brilliant researchers, that make key AI topics accessible to the general public in Spanish. I highly recommend their works: “Los sesgos del algoritmo” by Gabriela Arriagada, and “El humano futuro” by Pedro Maldonado.
2024.05.16: Over the past two months, I was invited by the Science Ministry to speak as a researcher at the launch of the new AI public policy in Chile (MinCiencia). I was also an invited speaker at the First Chilean Congress on Law and Technology (youtube).
2024.03.16: Earlier this month, I received a promotion to principal researcher at CENIA! I will be co-leading the Research Line 5, which focuses on human-centered AI, along with Dr. Marcelo Mendoza (PUC). I was also highlighted in a La Tercera #8M special, focusing on women’s contribution to AI in Chile. Besides, a podcast with Davor Mimica about AI and democracy was launched, where I appear in the first three episodes.
2024.30.01: In January 2024, I had the privilege of being a speaker at Congreso Futuro, which stands as one of Chile’s foremost events for the popularization of science. It proved to be an incredible and enlightening experience on multiple levels. I gained valuable insights into effectively communicating our research to a broad and diverse audience. During the event, I delivered a talk, took part in a panel held in Valparaiso, and joined another panel dedicated to the work conducted in the working groups established by the Senate, focused on the topic of “regulating AI.” Additionally, I had the opportunity to share my research on various media platforms, including TVN, CNN, Radio Sonar, Radio 13C, Cooperativa Ciencia, Piensa Digital, La Tercera, El Mostrador, and others. My talk was also featured in several outlets (CNN, Congreso Futuro, La Tercera, Ciencia en Chile). I also felt that my research and academic journey resonated with the interests of young and not-so-young people, inside and outside academia. That was, I think, one of the most rewarding parts of the whole amazing experience I got to live.
2023.10.02: These two last weeks were very exciting as well. I was invited by the Minister of Sciences to be a panelist at the panel “Inteligencia Artificial al servicio de las personas” in a Ethics and AI Forum for Latin America and the Caribbean. I was also an invited speaker at the “Primera Jornada de Neurociencias e Inteligencia Artificial.” I then traveled to Mexico, and was a keynote speaker at the Latin American Conference in HCI (CLIHC). Finally, I was invited by Globethics and Club of Rome to participate in a full-day conversation and a panel in Geneva to share my views and experiences working on ethics in AI from the Global South.
2023.09.16: In the last two weeks I traveled to the USA twice. First, I visited Fermilab, a particle physics Lab in the USA, as part of a delegation from UTFSM. Then, during a few days in Chile, I gave two talks at the Pontificial Universidad Católica de Chile, in the Applied Ethics Institute and Literature Department. Later, I went to Pittsburgh and then traveled to Minneapolis to attend a CSCW workshop on AI auditing. Rosta Farzan and I, as general co-chairs of CSCW 2024, presented the venue of the next conference, which will be National Convention Center in San Jose, Costa Rica!
2023.08.30: Today, I presented at the Science Committee of the Chamber of Deputies as part of the discussion of a law project to regulate the operation of AI in Chile. My presentation begins at the one hour and 33-minute mark in this video.
2023.08.28: In August, I had the opportunity to speak at “Protagonistas 2030,” an event tailored for high-school students, which was organized by the newspaper “El Mercurio.” My presentation centered on exploring the intricate connection between gender and artificial intelligence. Here is a short capsule motivating the talk. Additionally, I collaborated with Carla Toro to produce a podcast episode delving into the intersection of Wikimedia and AI. Furthermore, my university highlighted our UX Lab in its magazine, featuring it on page 26 in an edition dedicated to the topic of digital transformation.
2023.08.12: In the last months, I participated in Shots de Ciencia, a Colombian podcast focused on science and technology. My voice appears in two episodes about intelligence and biases. I also attended the ceremony to present the first AI Latam Index, led by CENIA. I contributed a bit to the index, co-writing a piece of content about ethics and AI in the last chapter about the Future of AI.
2023.08.01: I am delighted to share the exciting news that Dr. Pamela Soto will be joining the Gender Observatory in Science and Engineering at UTFSM as a postdoctoral researcher. I am proud to be sponsoring Dr. Soto’s two-year postdoc role, during which she will be focusing on research areas that intersect gender, STEM, and democracy.
2023.04.30: In the current year, I am honored to be supporting Colin Hartvick’s journey as he embarks on an international internship at CENIA. Colin is a student at ENSICAEN, the National Graduate School of Engineering and Research Center located in Caen, France. Starting from April 2023 and extending until August 16th, Colin has been actively engaged in developing the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) of the AI Observatory. Our team is excited to unveil this MVP to the public in the near future!
2023.03.11: In the first few months of 2023, Gabriela Arriagada and I have continued to work on ethics and feminist approaches to investigate and build AI at CENIA. Our opinion about gender inequities in AI were published in some media outlets on #8M (El Mostrador, El Mercurio–see below, USM, Portal Educa, and RedNoticiasvr) and about biases in AI (radio Pauta, Diario Financiero) Besides, Teresa Correa and I put together a team to work in AI and new citizenship in the new Millennium Nucleus, FAIR. News about this nucleus also appeared in a newspaper recently (La Tercera).
2022: We finally launched our UX Lab! I am also contributing to initiatives about innovation at the university and gender equity in research, and I am working at CENIA to better address ethical issues around AI. I helped organizing ChileWiC’22 and an ACM SIGCHI event in Santiago. And, our proposal of a Millenium Nucleus in Social Sciences was awarded! We will investigate “Futures of Artificial Intelligence and its socio-cultural implications in Chile and Latin America.”
2021: Our ANID-COVID project ended with a new app. Aliadas, which is available now. Here is a note about it. I was also working on designing and building the UX Lab at our main campus, as described here. I joined the National Center in Artificial Intelligence (CENIA), working in human-centered artificial intelligence. I also served as general co-chair of CLIHC 2021, which is the Latin American conference in HCI.
2020: What a year, again! The social movement continued in Chile, and a global pandemic started. This year there were no trips, no visiting scholars at all. We taught the online two academic terms. Nevertheless, my elective course on “User-centered design methods” had more students than ever! I also had the opportunity to speak at more outreach talks and panels than ever before. This year, I read some cool books that I suspect will influence my research and work forever. They are Data feminism, Race after technology, and Design justice. In that line, I have been working on strengthening the role and visibility of human-centered computing. By the end of June, Dr. Paulina Santander, Dr. Victor Codocedo, and I got the news that our COVID19-related project was one of the 63 funded ANID projects out of more than 1,000 proposals! We assembled a cool team of an engineer and twelve students (w/gender parity) to execute the project. We are working hard to achieve our goals and contribute to the associativity among women entrepreneurs in our region.
2019: What a year! I am writing this well after 2019. In that year, I hosted or co-hosted several great scholars at UTFSM: Dr. Cecilia Aragon (UW), Dr. Brian Butler (UMD), Dr. Maria Luz Guenaga (Deusto) Dr. Rosta Farzan (Pitt), Dr. Bruce McLaren (CMU), Dr. Adriana Vivacqua (UFRJ), and Dr. Ignacio Arana (CMU). I had the opportunity to attend The Web Conference in San Francisco, visited colleagues at University of Pittsburgh and Arizona State University. I also got engaged in several initiatives to strengthen the HCI/CSCW community in LatAm. I was selected to attend the International summer school in research methods for HCI/CSCW in Brazil. Along with several LatAm researchers, we organized the first CSCW@LatAm research catalyst workshop in Panama City, which was sponsored by the ACM SIGCHI development fund. The ACM Interactions magazine published some of the conclusions of our work about LatAm. I collaborated to design and analyze a validation for the RDF Explorer, a tool created by Hernán Vargas (a master student by then) and his advisor Dr. Carlos Buil. This work obtained the best student paper award at ISWC 2019. I also guided Diego Apablaza’s capstone project, which was awarded by the Chilean Chamber of Deputies. Then, in October, an impressive social movement started in Chile, and life took many, many turns. We moved to teach online, and my research and publications slowed down significantly. On the bright side, we created a beautiful group of female feminist colleagues (now close friends!) and organized ten panels to talk about a new constitution’s prospect. I moderated the first one! (news)
2018.12.13: I received a recognition award from the UTFSM students’ organization due to my gender equity support. This year there was a feminist movement among our students and students all over the country. I was impressed by their strength, clarity and drive. I just supported them. I cannot believe they completely changed the narrative. We were all talking about gender discrimination and feminism everywhere!
2018.09.28 – 2018.10.9: During these days, I was pleased to present at the “IV Conferencia Internacional de Innovación en Ingeniería de Sistemas,” Universidad del Magdalena, Santa Marta, Colombia. My invited talk was titled “Social Technologies and civic participation: context challenges and research methods.” I also attended the 2018 ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), where I co-organized the workshop “Latin America as a Place for CSCW Research“, along with Cleidson de Souza, Sane Gaytan, Francisco Gutierrez, Cecilia Aragon, and Marcos Borges. In this workshop, our Master student Felipe González presented preliminary findings of his recent work. At the end of the trip, Felipe presented his paper “Development of Computational Thinking in High School Students: A Case Study in Chile” in the TICXED event, which is part of the JCC in Santiago, Chile. His paper and presentation got the best paper award!
2018.10.26: After several months of preparation, we finally hosted Chile WiC 2018: VII Chilean Conference of Women in Computing, an ACM Celebration. The event was indeed a celebration, we enjoyed more than 30 talks from female students, professionals, and professors in the field of computing. Almost 200 people participated in the event and the goals of building a more connected community and making more visible the diversity of jobs that women do in the field were definitely achieved. (foto final, fayerWayer, DCC)
2018.09.15 – 2018.09.30: Along with Dr. Rosta Farzan, we attended and presented our paper “Assessing competition for social media attention among non-profits” at the International Conference on Social Informatics in St. Petersburg, Russia. During this trip, we also received news about the selection of our Conicyt-MEC proposal “Developing a teaching and research agenda on social computing” to be conducted in 2019-20.
2018.05.20 – 2018.06.01: I visited Dr. Rosta Farzan at the University of Pittsburgh for two weeks to advance our collaborative work that is part of my Fondecyt research project. I also advanced another research project, which is conducted along with Dr. Ignacio Arana, from CMU.
2018.05.04: Along with Valeria Herskovic (PUC) and Francisco Gutierrez (U. Chile), I am co-organizing an initiative to launch the ACM SIGCHI local chapter Santiago-Chile. The local chapter is our attempt to create collaboration and association ties among researchers, practitioners, and students interested in HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) in the country. The first event of the local chapter attracted more than 40 people! In this event, we discussed the chapter’s goals and Dr. Cecilia Aragon gave a talk on her research about Human-Centered Data Science.
2017.04.24: Our internal multidisciplinary research grant proposal entitled “Twitter and presidential leadership” was funded! The proposal focuses on exploring theories of leadership using Twitter data generated by and for Latin American presidents. My co-PIs in this project are Dr. Lorena Zuchel, Dr. Marianna Oyanedel, Dr. Claudio Tapia, and Dr. Ignacio Arana.
2018.03.03 – 2018.05.04: Dr. Cecilia Aragon, Professor at the University of Washington, visited the Departamento de Informática for nine weeks. She was selected by the Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program 2017-18 to conduct a research and teaching stay at UTFSM, Valparaíso, Chile. During her time at the university, she taught a graduate class on Data Visualization (which was available to senior undergrads) and gave several talks on the UW’s data science master program and Institute. Together, we started two exciting research projects that hopefully will lead us to publish together.
2018.02.19 – 2018.02.20: I was highly privileged to be selected to participate in an ACM SIGCHI Across Borders event in Guatemala City. This was an exciting event where I had a chance to meet colleagues from Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, and Brazil. We agreed to move a shared HCI agenda in Latin America.
2017.12.20 – 2018.01.04: Dr. Rosta Farzan and Dr. Yu-Ru Lin visited our department to work on my Fondecyt project. They also participated in a research event that was funded by the same project and that focused on “Leveraging digital traces to address urban challenges.” More info on CIS co-lab and this news.
2017.06.24 – 2017.07.24: I participated in a 2-week teaching mobility program at VGTU in Vilnius, Lithuania. I had a chance to teach a social computing class and meet several colleagues from Information Systems, Electronics, and Graphic Systems. I was also pleased to visit its awesome FabLab. Before visiting VGTU, I attended two conferences (C&T 2017 in Troyes and Hypertext 2017 in Prague) where our work in different projects had been accepted as full papers.
2017.04.27 – 2017.05.20: I visited the University of Pittsburgh for three weeks as part of my research collaboration funded by grant Conicyt – Fondecyt de Iniciación. In collaboration with Dr. Rosta Farzan, Dr. Yu-Ru Lin, and PhD student Di Lu, we submitted two camera-ready papers to Hypertext and C&T 2017, worked in a journal article submission, and got acceptance of an article in the journal Transactions on Internet Technologies!
2017.04.14: Our internal research grant proposal entitled “Analysis of gender gaps in engineering careers in the UTFSM” was funded! Dr. Lioubov Dombrovskaia is the PI and I will work as one of the co-PIs in the project.
2016.09.21: My research project was selected for funding from Conicyt, Chile. This grant will fund my research project for the next three years, starting in November 2016!
2016.08.21- 2016.08.22: Dr. Cecilia Aragon, Professor at the University of Washington, visited our school and it was my pleasure to be her host. In her stay, Cecilia gave talks on Data Visualization and User-Centered Data Science.
2016.07.26 – 2016.08.9: I am visiting Dr. Rosta Farzan at University of Pittsburgh for two weeks. Rosta and I are working on the project “Digital inclusion in Hyper-local online communities”.
2016.04.12: I received notification of the acceptance of our journal article “Information and people in a social information system for academic conferences.”, which is one of the results of our team work on the Conference Navigator project at PAWS lab @Pitt.
2016.04.01: As a result of our work with Dr. Sharon Hsiao during February, two short papers were accepted at Hypertext 2016 and ICALT 2016, respectively.
2016.03.23: I got my first research grants as a faculty! Two of my projects obtained funding from my university. I am the PI of the project: “Towards a model of impact of participatory information technologies on NGOs: An analysis of networks of social capital” and I am co-PI in the multidisciplinary project “Women in Engineering: A study of the professional trajectories of female engineers who graduated from UTFSM”. News about the first project were featured in my university’s web site.
2016.02.1 – 2016.02.13: I visited Dr. Sharon Hsiao at Arizona State University for two weeks. Sharon and I worked on the project “Investigating and Supporting Programming Learning via Social Interactions in Online Discussion Forums”.
2015.12.21: Dr. Rosta Farzan, Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and my first visiting scholar, gave a talk titled “Wikipedia in Classroom: Bidirectional Benefits of Students’ Engagement in Online Production Communities”. She also gave an interview to the UTFSM press, which is available in Spanish.
2015.11.10: I gave an academic talk about “Participatory Information Systems for (and by) Urban Communities” at the Latinity conference, Universidad Mayor, Santiago.
2015.10.16: I presented my work on “Modeling sustainability of social information systems for urban communities: A mixed-method approach” at the RedSTI workshop, Universidad del Bio-Bio, Chillan.
Claudia López Moncada 