Education

University of Trento, Trento, Italy
Doctor of Philosophy, Information and Communication Technologies, 2017
Dissertation: Empowering Online Idea Management for Civic Engagement with Public Displays and Social Networking Services
Dissertation Committee: Luca Cernuzzi (chair), Barbara Pernici, and Vincenzo D’Andrea

Catholic University “Nuestra Señora de la Asunción,” Asunción, Paraguay
Informatics Engineering, Department of Electronics and Informatics, 2010

Catholic University “Nuestra Señora de la Asunción,” Asunción, Paraguay
Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.), Informatics, Department of Electronics and Informatics, 2006

Academic and Research Appointments

Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Information and Communications Technologies, Pompeu Fabra University, Spain, December 2022 – present

Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, February 2021 – November 2022

Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Life Science, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain, February 2019 – January 2021

Research Fellow, Department of Electronics and Informatics, Catholic University “Nuestra Señora de la Asunción,” Asuncion, Paraguay, September 2018 – January 2019

Data Scientist Fellow, Data Science for Social Good, The University of Chicago, USA, Summer 2018

Research Fellow, Department of Electronics and Informatics, Catholic University “Nuestra Señora de la Asunción,” Asuncion, Paraguay, February 2016 – May 2018

Ph.D. Researcher, Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento, Italy, 2011-2015

Visiting Scholar, Center for Information Technology Research in Interest of the Society (CITRIS), University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA, Summer-Fall 2014

Visiting Researcher, Information Analysis Division, Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, California, USA, Fall 2013

Experiences as a Software Engineer

Software Engineer, NGO Paraguay Educa, 2010-2011. Technologies: Python, Javascript

Software Engineer, Catholic University of Asuncion with Ministry of Education and Culture, Inter-American Development Bank and Organization of Inter-American States, 2008. Technologies: Python, Javascript

Experiences as a Software Developer

Software Developer, Azucarera Iturbe, 2007. Technologies: Ruby on Rails and Javascript

Software Developer, Casa Escauriza I.C.S.A., 1999 (High-school Internship). Technologies: Visual Basic

Teaching Experiences

Teaching Assistance. Pompeu Fabra University. Course: Data Structures and Algorithms. April 2023 – June 2023

Research Mentor. Complutense University of Madrid. Cotutor of the undergraduate final project Giving visibility to workplace injustices published on Twitter via a decentralized blockchain-based platform, September 2021 – June 2022

Research Mentor. Catholic University “Nuestra Señora de la Asunción,” Asuncion, Paraguay. Tutor of the undergraduate final project SmartParking: a tool to optimize the use of public parking spaces and Heuristics-based algorithms to identify social bots, January 2019 – February 2020

Research Mentor. Catholic University “Nuestra Señora de la Asunción,” Asuncion, Paraguay. Cotutor of the undergraduate final project Context-aware civic participation and Automatic processing of civic contributions through Machine Learning and Data Visualization, February 2016 – July 2018

Lecturer. Catholic University “Nuestra Señora de la Asunción,” Asuncion, Paraguay. Course: Data Science with social impact. October 2017 – December 2017

Research Mentor. University of Trento, Italy. Cotutor of the master thesis Analyzing and visualizing citizen opinions collected from social networks. November 2014 – March 2015

Teaching Assistant. University of Trento, Italy. Course: Web Programming Technologies, which was focused on J2EE web technologies (e.g., Servlet, JSP, JSTL, JavaBean). February 2015 – September 2015

Lecturer. Polytechnic School, National University of Asuncion. Course: Development for Sugar Operating System. May 2010 – July 2010

Lecturer. NGO Paraguay Educa. Course: Sugar Operating System. October 2008 – December 2008.

Teaching Assistant. Catholic University “Nuestra Señora de la Asunción,” Asuncion, Paraguay. Course: Programming Languages, which was focused on algorithms and data structures (C language). February 2006 – July 2007

Presentations

Conference Papers

Jorge Saldivar, “Blockchain (not) for everyone: Design challenges of blockchain-based applications,” ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Hamburg, Germany, April 2023 → Youtube

Jorge Saldivar, “Online Idea Management for Civic Engagement: A Study on the Benefits of Integration with Social Networking,” ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Glasgow, Scotland, May 2019 → Slides Youtube

Jorge Saldivar, “Strengthening civic participation in Paraguay through online technology,” The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, April 2018 → Slides Youtube

Jorge Saldivar, “Idea Management in Social Networks: A Study on how to Tap into the Ideas of Facebook Communities,” International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS), Orlando, Florida, USA, October 2016. → Slides

Jorge Saldivar, “Idea Management Communities in the Wild: An exploratory study of 166 online communities,” International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS), Orlando, Florida, USA, October 2016. → Slides

Invited Talks

Jorge Saldivar, “Co-diseñando aplicaciones basadas en blockchain para comunidades de economía colaborativa,” Instituto de Tecnología del Conocimiento, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain, March 2022 → Slides Youtube

Jorge Saldivar, “Machine Learning for Social Good: A case study in the healthcare sector,” DataBeers, Barcelona, Spain, December 2019 → Slides Youtube

Jorge Saldivar and Cristhian Parra, “Redes sociales en tiempos electorales,” Superior Court of Electoral Justice, Asunción, Paraguay, November 2018. → Slides

Jorge Saldivar, “Ciencia de los datos aplicada al sector público,” Science, Technology, and Innovation Workshop, Asunción, Paraguay, November 2018. → Slides

Jorge Saldivar, “Ciencia de los datos aplicada a políticas públicas,” Ministry of Social Development, Asunción, Paraguay, September 2018. → Slides Media

Jorge Saldivar, “Civic CrowdAnalytics: Machine Learning para el análisis de contribuciones cívicas,” JIT-Cita Conference, Asunción, Paraguay, November 2017. → Slides Program

Jorge Saldivar, “Empowering Online Idea Management for Civic Engagement with Public Displays and Social Networking Services,” Charles III University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain, May 2017. → Slides

Cristhian Parra and Jorge Saldivar, “Civic Technologies,” Catholic University of Asuncion, Asunción, Paraguay, April 2017. → Slides

Jorge Saldivar, “Civic CrowdAnalytics,” VTech, Asunción, Paraguay, December 2016. → Slides

Jorge Saldivar, “Participa.PY: Generando espacios de participación cívica por medio de la tecnología,” Expo Gobierno Abierto, Asunción, Paraguay, September 2016. → Slides

Jorge Saldivar, “Voz y voto: Hacia una democracia más participativa,” Partido Patria Querida, Asunción, Paraguay, July 2016. → Slides

Jorge Saldivar, “Social Networks for Enhancing Idea Management Systems Used in the Civic Domain,” Data and Democracy Group, CITRIS, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, California, USA, July 2014. → Slides

Gianluca Schiavo and Jorge Saldivar, “Agora 2.0: Increasing Engagement with Onsite Public Display,” IdeaScale Webinar, October 2013 → Slides Video

Invited Panelist

“Gamify Democracy,” World Forum For Democracy, Strasbourg, France, November 2016. → Photos Podcast

Collaboration in Research Communities

Program Committee, Participatory Design Conference (PDC) 2020

Program Committee, International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS) 2016

Reviewed scientific articles and papers for the following conferences and journals: CHI (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), CSW (Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing), WWW (Int. Conf. on World Wide Web), ISOC (Int. Conf. on Service Oriented Computing), CTS (International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems), ICEIS (Int. Conf. on Enterprise Information Systems), Academic Mindtrek, JSMO (Journal of Social Media for Organization), ISD (International Conference on Information Systems Development)

Awards and Honors

Co-Recipient. Honorary Mention. National Science Award. Paraguay, 2018

Recipient. STARS Post-doctoral Fellowship. EU Horizon 2020 Programme, 2018

Recipient. Data Science for Social Good Fellowship. The University of Chicago, USA, 2018

Co-Recipient. Best Paper Award. Academic Mindtrek Conference, October 2016

Recipient. Ph.D. student fellowship. University of Trento, Trento, Italy, 2011-2014

Recipient. Ph.D. on the Move scholarship. Trento RISE Association, Trento, Italy, 2013

Recipient. FC-UPM-IB scholarship for post-graduate studies at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain, 2011

Recipient. Golden medal for the best graduate student of the 2000 class at San José High School, Asuncion, Paraguay, 2000

Voluntary Work and Other Experiences

Member of the Board of Directors of the Movimiento Peregrino. Asunción, Paraguay, 2017-2018

Eleven years as a leader of the Movimiento Peregrino. Activities: group work and group management, seminars, and team coordination for the organization of events, including retreats, conferences, and meetings. Asunción, Paraguay, 1999-2011

Two years as a General Coordinator of the Board of Directors of the Movimiento Peregrino. Asunción, Paraguay, 2009-2011

Four years as a Member of the Board of Directors of the Civil Association Movimiento Peregrino. Asunción, Paraguay, 2007-2011

Founder of the NGO Paraguay Educa, which was in charge of the local deployment of the project One Laptop per Child, 2008