- Event name: Opening talk, Master in Computational Social Science
- Date: 2026-09-18
- Location: Salón de Grados, Puerta de Toledo Campus, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M)
Summary: Inaugural talk for the new cohort of the UC3M Master in Computational Social Science. Using my own path from economics research to leading Data Science and AI at idealista, I argued that careers grow from a loop: a question you care about, a wall, a missing tool, and the work of getting it.
Key ideas:
- Knowledge gaps shaped my career: each stage, from researcher and PhD (with the computational wake-up call at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) to individual contributor and manager, added a new set of tools. The tools were never the point.
- AI is terribly good at using tools, and it will keep improving: treat it as another abstraction layer. Understand the fundamentals deeply and delegate the implementation details.
- AI makes answers cheaper. We decide which questions deserve attention: follow your questions and let curiosity shape your career.
- Social scientists are the missing piece: asking why (clicks vs. needs, behaviour vs. motivation), separating correlation and prediction from causation and levers, and anticipating second-order consequences.
- Social science in the real world: clean experiments are rare, better tools widen the evidence (qualitative and quantitative), and every answer has context.
- We can do it. Should we?: the ethical judgment behind every data product.