01
Spring 2025, 2026
Generative Artificial Intelligence
Foundations and applications of generative models, up to what it takes to put one in front of real users without it falling over.
transformersfine-tuningretrievalevaluation
Artificial intelligence is the industrial revolution of our time. My work is measuring what it is doing to the society living through it.
Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Engineering, Universidad de Concepción, deputy director of its Center for Data and Artificial Intelligence (CDIA), and associate researcher at the Millennium Nucleus MEPOP.
workinequalityautomationnarrativesagentspublic policy
selected work
Things builtfor whole populations
Participation platforms, national data observatories and applied AI, from the Chilean social outbreak to the French presidential election. Several were built for a moment and have since been retired; they are listed here as milestones, not as live products.
01
2026
PuroChile
AI agents can read any number of sources in seconds; what they cannot do alone is reconcile them. PuroChile is a set of rules no step may skip: every figure is rebuilt from its parts, checked against what the official source published, and the difference declared when it does not match. It is developed at the CDIA, and Chile's public data is its first test.
purochile.ai ↗- Country, 16 regions, 56 provinces, 346 communes
- Census 2024 · Casen · SII · DEIS · Mineduc
- Every check published next to the figure
- Queryable from AI agents over MCP
02
2017 — 2021
DataChile
Core contributor to Chile's flagship open-data observatory: economic, demographic and complexity profiles for every commune in the country, explored by millions of people.
Archived03
2022
MonProgramme 2022
Citizens assembled their own government programme from more than a hundred candidate proposals. The participation data became the Nature Human Behaviour paper on political divisiveness.
Archived04
2019
Chilecracia
A pairwise-comparison platform that measured citizen priorities during the 2019 outbreak — disagreement quantified while it was still happening.
Archived05
2021
Asuprioriza
Built with ARCA Latam and ABC Digital to find where residents of Asunción actually agree.
Archived06
2021
Constitutín
A playful tool that taught more than twenty constitutional topics to the public during Chile's constitutional process.
Archived07
ongoing
AI World
Mapping the world's artificial-intelligence capabilities: who can build what, and where.
aiworld.eu ↗el mostrador
Writing forthe public argument
Seventeen opinion columns on artificial intelligence, work, democracy and education — the research, translated into the terms of a debate already under way.
most recent
17 Aug 2026First artificial intelligence exists, then I think17 Jul 2026The cost of saying thank you24 May 2026Will AI licences become the new tax on employment?31 Mar 2026Ending free tuition for over-30s: a door slammed on the technical middle class16 Mar 2026Humanity's rebellion against the machines: a dystopian future?
2016 — today
From datato artificial intelligence
- Data2016 — 2018
- 2016
Industrial Engineering, UdeC
A thesis with Pablo Catalán mapping the global cluster space from 1988 to 2014 — the first version of a question he is still asking. Research follows at the Center for Innovation Systems Studies (CIS2).
- 2017
DataChile
Chile's open-data observatory goes live: economic, demographic and complexity profiles for every commune. Other national data platforms follow, among them one for the Government of Estonia.
- Digital democracy2019 — 2023
- 2019
Chilecracia · Utrecht
A platform that measured citizen priorities live during the social outbreak, and a research stay at Utrecht University.
- 2020
Ph.D. at ANITI, Toulouse
Starts a doctorate at the Artificial and Natural Intelligence Toulouse Institute, on how AI can improve local and global governance: digital and augmented democracy.
- 2021
Asuprioriza · Constitutín
Participation tools for Asunción, Paraguay, and for Chile's constitutional process.
- 2022
MonProgramme · Research Policy
A participation platform for the French election, and the science–technology cross-space study — now his most-cited paper.
- 2023
Ph.D. Toulouse · Nature
Doctorate in Computer Science. The population-scale study of political divisiveness in France and Brazil appears in Nature Human Behaviour.
- Artificial intelligence2024 — today
- 2024
Faculty of Engineering, UdeC
Joins Universidad de Concepción as Assistant Professor, teaching Data Visualization and Multivariate Statistics.
- 2025
Generative AI · MEPOP
Designs and launches the Generative Artificial Intelligence course, joins the Millennium Nucleus MEPOP and receives a teaching distinction from the Faculty.
- 2026
Deputy Director, CDIA
Becomes deputy director of the Center for Data and Artificial Intelligence at the Faculty of Engineering.
- 2026
PuroChile
A protocol for AI agents to reconcile every figure with its official source, tested on Chile's public data.
- 2026
A public voice
Seventeen columns in El Mostrador on AI, work, education and democracy — research argued where it matters.
research lines
The questionsthat occupy me
Artificial intelligence is not one subject but a set of pressures on things that already mattered: work, education, public argument, and who gets to build. These are the four I am pushing on.
01
Work and the labour market
What generative AI destroys, what it creates, and whether that difference shows up in Chilean data before it shows up in Chilean politics.
02
Narratives and the history of fear
Every wave of automation produced the same argument. Reading the debates of the Industrial Revolution alongside today's is how you tell what is genuinely new from what only feels new.
03
Machines that write and judge
What models prefer when they rank, decide and moralise — and how well any of us can still tell their writing from our own.
04
Agents and democratised capability
Multi-agent systems and small models putting advanced tools within reach of the firms and institutions that were never going to buy them.
AI-first
A team of agentsat the frontier of knowledge
I work AI-first. Artificial intelligence does not come in at the end to polish the prose; it is the team the research is done with. An orchestrator breaks the question down and specialised agents work it in parallel — they read, analyse, challenge and verify one another — until only what held up is left. It means working where knowledge is moving: with tools that did not exist two years ago, on questions nobody has closed yet.
session logillustrative
- orchestrator reading
Gather everything published on generative AI and employment in Chile since 2023.
- reading analysis
41 sources read. Three employment series are comparable with each other.
- analysis critique
Hypothesis: the occupations most exposed to AI are growing more slowly.
- critique analysis
What about the business cycle? Test it against unexposed sectors before claiming it.
- verification orchestrator
Two figures don't match their official source. Flagged, not corrected.
- writing human judgement
Draft ready: every claim with its source, every doubt in plain sight.
orchestratedelegatechallengeverifydecide
/ the judgement is still human; the scale no longer is /
industry & public sector
Bringing AIinto the room
A good part of the work is not code but conversation: sitting down with executive teams at Chilean companies and public institutions to work out what generative AI can actually do for them, what it cannot, and what it would cost to find out. These sessions run through the Faculty of Engineering and the CDIA.
/ the useful question is never whether it works, but where it pays /
archive
Some of itin photographs
2026
Presenting the Minors platform to the Office of Teaching
Concepción
2025
Panel at the launch of Jeannette von Wolfersdorff's book
Facultad de Ingeniería UdeC
2025
Opening keynote, III Meeting of Doctorates in Linguistics
Concepción
![Panel on AI in academia, [genIA] UdeC](/gallery/genia-udec.jpg)
2025
Panel on AI in academia, [genIA] UdeC
Concepción
2026
AI and scientific publishing
Facultad de Ingeniería UdeC
2019
Visiting student, Utrecht University
Netherlands
2017
DataChile launch
Santiago
The archive is still thin
Ten years of launches, fieldwork, classrooms and conferences, and only a handful of pictures survived. If you have photographs from any of these projects, they are welcome here.
Send a photograph →peer-reviewed
Selectedresearch
How populations divide during elections, and how scientific and technological capabilities accumulate in places.
2023Understanding political divisiveness using online participation data from the 2022 French and Brazilian presidential elections2022The scientific and technological cross-space: is technological diversification driven by scientific endogenous capacity?2025'It's the economy, stupid': mapping electoral divisiveness in Chile from 1989 to 2021
universidad de concepción
Three coursesat the Faculty of Engineering
Taught with the same bias as everything above: advanced methods pointed at concrete problems.
02
Fall 2024 — 2026
Data Visualization
Visual communication from first principles, up to the single chart that has to change a decision.
encodingperceptioninteractiondashboards
03
Fall 2025, 2026
Multivariate Statistical Analysis
Regression, PCA and clustering, applied end to end on real industrial-engineering data rather than clean textbook sets.
regressionPCAclusteringinference
news
What I have been doingand what I talk about
Interviews, talks, courses and things built, as the press and the university reported them.
24 Sep 2026A platform to track the university's MinorsBuilt by four Industrial Engineering students under his and Jorge Maluenda's lead, and presented to the Office of Teaching so the whole university can follow each student's progress towards certification.21 Sep 2026AI as a geopolitical conflictOn whether AI can be slowed down: a contest between the United States and China over whose companies hold our data, models able to find and exploit vulnerabilities, and a Latin America still outside the global conversation.4 Sep 2026AI Agents and Data AnalysisA full-day course for professionals at the UdeC Santiago campus: dashboards and exploratory analysis driven by AI agents.Jun 2026AI Agents and Machine Learning IThe data-analytics module of the CDIA course, with AI agents doing the exploratory work alongside the analyst.1 Jun 2026AI-driven cyberattacks are a structural shiftThe models that got good at solving problems also got good at finding holes: flaws that went unnoticed for fifteen or twenty years are exposed overnight.25 May 2026AI for writing, reviewing and finding research gapsWith Ian Scott, at the Faculty's day on scientific publishing: AI tools for communicating results, spotting gaps in the literature and supporting editorial review.
Working on somethingworth measuring?
Applied AI with industry or the public sector, research collaborations, or students looking for a thesis topic.
cnavarretel@udec.cl →