About

My name is Paola Tubaro and I am research professor (Directrice de Recherche) at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS, in French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique). Trained as an economist and gradually morphed into a sociologist, I am a member of Centre de Recherche en Economie et Statistique (CREST) at Institut Polytechnique de Paris, in the Greater Paris area. I use social network science to shed new light on the contemporary transformations of markets and organizations. My current research focuses on the digital platform economy, the global production networks of artificial intelligence, the role of human labour in the development of automation, digital inequalities, and the spread of online disinformation. I am also interested in the ethics of data and artificial intelligence in a connected world.

I am a co-founder of the Digital Platform Labour (DiPLab) research group at Institut Polytechnique de Paris, and of the International Network on Digital Labour (INDL).

I teach four courses at ENSAE Paris: social and economic network science (with Floriana Gargiulo), introduction to data ethics (1st year), data ethics (2nd year) and ethics and responsibility in data science (3rd year). Elsewhere, I teach sociology of social networks at ENS/EHESS (with Yasmine Houri). In Italy, I am a member of the PhD teaching committee at the department of economics of the University of Insubria, where I taught a Research Design course to first-year PhD students until 2022.

In 2023, I was a By-Fellow of Churchill College, University of Cambridge, UK, and I have been since then an affiliate member of the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, also at the University of Cambridge. Starting in 2025, I am a Senior researcher at the Millennium Nucleus for the Evolution of Work (M-NEW) in Santiago, Chile. I am an elected fellow (and starting in 2025, a member of the Council) of the European Academy of Sociology, and I co-convened for ten years the Social Networks Analysis Group of British Sociological Association.

I am a member of the Editorial Boards of Platforms & Society and of Revue française de sociologie, and I was in the Board of Sociology until December 2024.

From January 2016 until August 2022, I was at a major computer science lab, Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire des Sciences du Numérique, also in the Paris area, where I built bridges between the social sciences and the latest developments in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Before that (December 2009 – December 2015), I was at the Faculty of Business of the University of Greenwich, London. I was a Reader (in the British traditional academic career ladder, the equivalent of a tenured Associate Professor) in economic sociology, and the programme leader of the doctoral programme of the faculty of business and economics. In Britain, I also earned a Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy.