César Hidalgo

His work has been honored in 2018 with the Lagrange Prize, in 2019 with the Centennial Medal from the University of Concepcion, and in 2011 with the Bicentennial Medial from the Chilean Congress. Awards for his data visualization and distribution platforms include three Webbys, one Information is Beautiful award, and one Indigo Design Award.

DataAfrica makes available data on the health, poverty, agriculture, and climate, of thirteen African countries at the subnational level. DataAfrica won a 2018 webby award for best civil and government innovation.

DataChile integrates and distributes data from more than a dozen Chilean government departments. It won a 2018 Indigo Design Award.

In 2018, Hidalgo presented at TED's main event the idea of Augmented Democracy: a democracy in which people are represented directly by personalized digital twins powered by artificial intelligence. He is currently working on MonProgramme2022, a digital participation platform for the 2022 french presidential election.

DataUSA is an effort to visualize and distribute public data for the United States. It was launched on April 4, 2016 and acclaimed by The New York Times, The Atlantic's City Lab, and Fast Company. DataUSA received the Information is Beautiful Award in 2016 and a Webby Award in 2017 for best Civil and Government Innovation. DataUSA was built by Datawheel in collaboration with Deloitte.

Soon after its release the book was highly praised by economists including Paul Romer, who went on to win the Nobel prize for endogenous growth theory, Eric Beinhoecker, the director of Oxford's Institute for New Economic Thinking, and Tim Harford, a popular economics author and regular columnist for The Financial Times. Why Information Grows was also featured in The Economist's books and arts section of the July 25, 2015 print edition, in Nature's May 28, 2015 print edition, and Kirkus Reviews, among others.

Immersion is a data visualization engine for email metadata. Immersion helps uncover the networks people form while interacting through email. Immersion was co-authored by Hidalgo together with Daniel Smilkov and Deepak Jagsdish, while both Smilkov and Jagdish were working as students in Hidalgo's Macro Connection's group. Immersion was released in 2013, and quickly became popular as a way to demonstrate what people can learn by looking only at email metadata.

Hidalgo attended The Grange School until the age of fourteen. He completed his high school education at The British High School. From 1998 to 2003 he studied physics at Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. From 2004 to 2008 he obtained a PhD in physics from The University of Notre Dame with Albert-László Barabási as his PhD advisor. From 2008 to 2010 he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University.

César A. Hidalgo (born December 22, 1979) is a Chilean born, Chilean-Spanish-American physicist, author, and entrepreneur. He directs the Center for Collective Learning at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Institute (ANITI) of the University of Toulouse. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Manchester, and is a visiting professor at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Hidalgo is known for work on Economic Complexity, Relatedness, Data Visualization, Applied Artificial Intelligence, and Digital Democracy. Prior to joining the University of Toulouse, Hidalgo was a professor at MIT where he directed the Collective Learning group. He is also a founder and partner at Datawheel, a data visualization and distribution company.

Hidalgo was born in Santiago de Chile in 1979 to Cesar E. Hidalgo and Nuria Ramaciotti. His father was a publicist and journalist and his mother a K-12 school administrator. He has two siblings Caterina and Nuria.