Welcome / Bem-Vindo.

My name is Diogo F. Pacheco and I am passionate by data. I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at Indiana University, Bloomington--under the supervision of Fil Menczer and Alessandro Flammini. I am particularly interested in computational social science and modeling complex social behavior, i.e. combining the expertise of social, cognitive, and STEM scientists to develop tools to enhance our understanding about society. Previously, I studied computational intelligence and multi-objective optimization during my masters studies (2006-2008). At that time, deep learning did not exist as a buzzword yet, but artificial neural networks were one of the cores of my research, towards a decision support system designed for sugarcane harvest. After I graduated, I left academia to work for 5 years in the industry. I started my Ph.D. in 2013 at Florida Institute of Technology, advised by Prof. Ronaldo Menezes and co-supervision of Prof. Fernando Buarque, focusing on the exploration of social media data via the examination of the digital footprints as a proxy for understanding human behavior. My main research contribution was to propose a data-driven methodology to characterize users based on the attention given by them to a set of entities. The aggregation of these individual characterizations enable us: to characterize entities and places, to extract useful information regarding their relationship, and to correlate them with socio-economic indicators. I applied this methodology, using Twitter data, to study the characteristics of language spreading worldwide, the organ donation awareness in the US, and the role of supporters in the football characterization. In addition, we proposed the use of social media data as an estimator for social disorganization, showing the correlation between diversity of football supporters and crime in the UK. In the end of my PhD, I worked with human mobility models and information theory to investigate the impacts of predictability under partial information--a project in collaboration with Dr. Gourab Ghoshal at University of Rochester. I am also member of BioComplex Lab and I colaborate as an invited researcher of Computational Intelligence Research Group at University of Pernambuco. Here, you can find my publications and curriculum vitae.