# César Hidalgo

César A. Hidalgo (born December 22, 1979) is a Chilean born, Chilean-Spanish-American physicist, author, and entrepreneur. He is a tenured professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Toulouse School of Economics and director of the Center for Collective Learning a multidisciplinary research laboratory with offices at the Toulouse School of Economics and at Corvinus University of Budapest. He is also an Honorary Professor at the University of Manchester's Alliance Manchester Business School. Hidalgo is known for his work on economic complexity, relatedness, data visualization, applied artificial intelligence, and digital democracy. Before moving to France, 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 works broadly in the field of collective intelligence. His contributions to the field includes the introduction of methods to measure economic complexity and relatedness, the study of people's perception of A.I., the study of collective memory, and the development of multiple data visualization platforms, including The Observatory of Economic Complexity, DataUSA, DataViva, DataMexico, DataAfrica, and Pantheon, among others. He is the author of dozens of academic papers in complex systems, networks, and economic development, and has created applications of data science and artificial intelligence to understand urban perception and to explore the idea of augmented democracy.
Hidalgo has authored or co-authored three books The Atlas of Economic Complexity, Why Information Grows, and How Humans Judge Machines.
His work was 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.

## Early life and education

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.
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.

## Economic complexity

During his PhD Hidalgo began using networks to study economic development. Two key contributions here include The Product Space, a network that can be used to explain and predict the activities an economy is more likely to enter an exit, and the economic complexity index, a dimensionality reduction based formula that can be used to explain differences in economic growth, inequality, and emissions. The economic complexity index is a highly reproducible predictor of future economic growth and also is a strong explanatory factor of cross-national differences in income inequality and emission intensities. Hidalgo's work in Economic Complexity has been covered by important media outlets like The New York Times, The Economist, and The Financial Times.

## Why Information Grows

In Why Information Grows Hidalgo explains economic growth as a consequence of the growth of information and computation in the universe. The book starts by explaining the physical mechanisms that allow information to grow, and then unpacks these mechanisms in the context of social and economic systems. The main argument of the book is that the need for computation to be embodied, in cells, humans, or teams of humans, is what makes the growth of information in the economy both possible and difficult.
Soon after its release the book was highly praised by economists including Paul Romer, who a couple of years later won 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.

## Data visualization and distribution platforms

Hidalgo has co-authored a number of popular data visualization and distribution platforms. These are tools that make available vast volumes of data through visualizations. These platforms include:

### The Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC)

The OEC is a tool that makes available international trade data through more than 20 million visualizations. The Observatory of Economic Complexity focuses on the mix of products that countries export because this product mix is predictive of a country's future patterns of diversification, G.D.P. growth, and income inequality. The OEC was co-authored with Alex Simões, who developed this platform as his master thesis in the Macro Connections group at the MIT Media Lab.

### DataViva

DataViva is a visualization engine that makes available regional development data for all of Brazil through more than 1 billion visualizations. These visualizations include trade data, employment data and education data, for each of Brazil's more than 5000 municipalities and its hundreds of products, industries and occupations. DataViva was developed in a collaboration between Hidalgo, Alex Simões and Dave Landry, and the government of Minas Gerais in Brazil, including Minas's government department of strategic priorities and FAPEMIG, Minas Science funding agency.

### Pantheon

Pantheon is a data visualization engine focused on historical cultural production and impact. Pantheon helps users explore metadata on globally famous biographies as a mean to understand the process of collective memory and of the role of languages and communication technologies in the production and diffusion of cultural information. Amy Yu, Kevin Hu, and Cesar Hidalgo developed pantheon at the Macro Connections group at MIT.

### Immersion

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.

### DataUSA

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.

### DataAfrica

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

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

### DataMexico

DataMexico is a systematized information platform with more than 13,000 profiles about regional economy, infrastructure, exterior commerce, employment, education, gender equity, inequality, health, and public security in Mexico. Includes a section about Economic Complexity to visualize development opportunities through dynamics between industries and products.

## Urban Perception
### Place Pulse, Streetscore, and Streetchange

Place Pulse, Streetscore, and Streetchange are tools created to map people's perceptions of urban environments. Place Pulse has been featured in The Guardian and Fast Company. Streetscore has been featured in The Economist and New Scientist, among others.

## Augmented Democracy

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 has since engaged in the creation of civic participation platforms, such as MonProgramme2022 and Brazucracia, designed to collect people's preference over dozens of policy issues.