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      <div class="page-label">Confirmed</div>
      <h2>Speakers</h2>
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            <img src="images/johanbollen.jpeg" alt="Johan Bollen" />
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            <h3>Johan Bollen</h3>
            <span class="speaker-title">Computational Social Science</span>
            <span class="speaker-affil">University of Amsterdam · Netherlands</span>
            <p>Professor of Simulation of Complex Adaptive Systems at the Computational Science Lab, University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on how social media dynamics shape collective behaviour, public mood, and socio-economic outcomes. He is widely known for his pioneering work on large-scale sentiment analysis of social media data and its relationship to real-world phenomena including financial markets and public health.</p>
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            <img src="images/jesus_gomez.jpg" alt="Jesus Gomez-Gardeñes" />
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            <h3>Jesus Gomez-Gardeñes</h3>
            <span class="speaker-title">Statistical and Nonlinear Physics</span>
            <span class="speaker-affil">Universidad de Zaragoza · Spain</span>
            <p>Professor of Physics whose research focuses on the theoretical and computational modelling of complex systems, with a strong emphasis on data-driven approaches and the analysis of collective behaviour. His work spans areas such as epidemiology, ecology, systems biology, neuroscience, and the social sciences, employing tools from statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics, network science, and big data analysis to uncover the mechanisms and interactions that drive complex real-world systems.</p>
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            <img src="images/wagner-meira.jpg" alt="Wagner Meira Júnior" />
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            <h3>Wagner Meira Júnior</h3>
            <span class="speaker-title">Data Mining and Distributed Computing</span>
            <span class="speaker-affil">Federal University of Minas Gerais · Brazil</span>
            <p>Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UFMG, Brazil. His research focuses on scalable data mining and parallel and distributed computing, with applications to machine learning on massive datasets. He co-authored the widely used textbook <em>Data Mining and Analysis: Fundamental Concepts and Algorithms</em>. In recent years his work has expanded into social network analytics and disinformation, including highly cited research on political polarisation and public health during the COVID-19 pandemic. He is a CNPq Level 1B research fellow.</p>
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            <img src="images/jose_mendes.jpeg" alt="José Fernando Mendes" />
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            <h3>José F. F. Mendes</h3>
            <span class="speaker-title">Statistical Physics</span>
            <span class="speaker-affil">Universidade de Aveiro · Portugal</span>
            <p>Professor of Physics at the University of Aveiro working in statistical physics. In recent years, his work has focused on the study of complex systems and the structure and evolution of complex networks, including the World Wide Web, the Internet, and biological networks. His broader research interests also encompass granular media, self-organized criticality, non-equilibrium phase transitions, and deposition models.</p>
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            <img src="images/Marcos.jpeg" alt="Marcos Oliveira Jr." />
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            <h3>Marcos Oliveira Jr.</h3>
            <span class="speaker-title">Data Science and Climate AI</span>
            <span class="speaker-affil">Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul · Brazil</span>
            <p>Assistant Professor of Data Science at UFRGS, Campus Serra, and Honorary Research Fellow at the Nature and Climate Impact Team (NCIT), University of Exeter. His research applies AI to climate-related challenges, including disinformation detection, geospatial analysis, and climate data. His work has been presented at COP30 and the World Economic Forum 2026 in Davos, and connects computational methods with practical, public-facing applications in climate communication.</p>
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            <img src="images/diogo_pacheco.jpeg" alt="Diogo Pacheco" />
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            <h3>Diogo Pacheco</h3>
            <span class="speaker-title">Data Science and Misinformation</span>
            <span class="speaker-affil">University of Exeter · UK</span>
            <p>Diogo Pacheco is a Senior Lecturer in Data Science at the University of Exeter whose research sits at the intersection of computational social science and misinformation. His work examines the cognitive and social biases that make people vulnerable to false information, and develops methods for detecting coordinated inauthentic behaviour on social media platforms. His research interests span misinformation detection, network science, and data science.</p>
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            <img src="images/carol-foto.jpeg" alt="Carolina Scarton" />
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            <h3>Carolina Scarton</h3>
            <span class="speaker-title">Natural Language Processing</span>
            <span class="speaker-affil">University of Sheffield · UK</span>
            <p>Senior Lecturer in Natural Language Processing in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP), with particular interests in text adaptation, machine translation, online misinformation detection and verification, and the evaluation of NLP systems. She also explores applications of NLP in domains such as healthcare and robotics, as well as the development of dialogue systems.</p>
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            <img src="images/zeerak_talat.jpg" alt="Zeerak Talat" />
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            <h3>Zeerak Talat</h3>
            <span class="speaker-title">Artificial Intelligence and Media Studies</span>
            <span class="speaker-affil">University of Edinburgh · UK</span>
            <p>Assistant Professor in Responsible Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence at the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Their research sits at the intersection of machine learning, science and technology studies, and media studies, focusing on critical perspectives on how machine learning systems can reproduce social and political power structures, and on developing alternative approaches that challenge these dynamics.</p>
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            <img src="images/Leandro.jpg" alt="Leandro Tessler" />
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            <h3>Leandro Tessler</h3>
            <span class="speaker-title">Physics and Computational Social Science</span>
            <span class="speaker-affil">UNICAMP · Brazil</span>
            <p>Associate Professor at the Instituto de Física "Gleb Wataghin" (IFGW) at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. He holds a PhD from Tel Aviv University and has built a long career in condensed matter physics. In recent years his work has expanded into computational social science, focusing on disinformation dynamics and online community structures in Brazil, including studies on echo chambers, vaccine negationism, and the spread of health misinformation on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic.</p>
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            <img src="images/marcelo_trasel.jpeg" alt="Marcelo Träsel" />
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            <h3>Marcelo Träsel</h3>
            <span class="speaker-title">Media Studies</span>
            <span class="speaker-affil">Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul · Brazil</span>
            <p>Professor of Cyberjournalism at the undergraduate Journalism program (Fabico/UFRGS) and in the Graduate Program in Communication at UFRGS. He has professional experience in print journalism, online media, audiovisual production, and advertising. Former president of the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji).</p>
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            <img src="images/Erdem.jpg" alt="Erdem Yörük" />
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            <h3>Erdem Yörük</h3>
            <span class="speaker-title">Political Sociology and Computational Social Science</span>
            <span class="speaker-affil">Koç University · Turkey</span>
            <p>Professor of Sociology at Koç University (Istanbul) and Director of its Center for Computational Social Sciences. He is also an Associate Member in the Department of Social Policy and Intervention at the University of Oxford. He is Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded Emerging Welfare project, a large-scale comparative study of welfare state development in emerging market economies, spanning Brazil, Turkey, China, India, South Africa, Mexico, and Argentina. His research covers political sociology, social movements, welfare policy, and computational social science.</p>
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