Barbara Poblete is an Amazon Visiting Academic at Search Experience Science in Seattle, USA, and she is also an Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Chile. She was one of the founders and Principal Investigators of the Millennium Research Institute on Data, IMFD, and of the National AI Research Center in Chile, CENIA. Formerly she was a researcher at Yahoo! Labs.
She is considered a world-class expert in Social Media Analysis, Information Retrieval and Web Data Mining. Her work on “Information Credibility on Twitter”, published in 2011, was awarded the prestigious IW3C2 Seoul Test of Time Award at The Web Conference in 2021. This work was pioneer in the study of so-called “fake-news” and has been featured in SciAM, WSJ, Slate, The Huffington Post, BBC News and NPR, among others. Her research has also focused on the problem of multilingual and language agnostic approaches for online hate-speech and crisis informatics. In this regard, she has led initiatives such as Twicall.cl, a social-based real-time earthquake detection system, used by the National Seismology Center and other emergency response agencies in Chile (available until 2022). Other distinctions include the Google Latin American Research Award. She has co-authored over 85 peer-reviewed articles, mostly in top-tier venues such as The Web Conference, SIGIR, EMNLP and ISWC. Currently, she is among the top most cited women computer scientists in Latin America. She served as Program Committee Chair for SIGIR, CIKM Short Papers, Track Chair for The Web Conference, the SIGIR Doctoral Consortium Chair, SPIRE. In addition, she was Co-host for Communication of the ACM’s Special Edition on Latin America, Editorial Board member for Foundations & Trends in IR, Associate Editor for ACM TWeb and EPJ Data Science, among others.