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) 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 the artificial intelligence industry, the role of human labor in the development of automation, and digital inequalities. I am also interested in the ethics of data and artificial intelligence.

I teach three courses at ENSAE Paris: social and economic network science (with Floriana Gargiulo), data ethics, and ethics and responsibility in data science. I also supervise an applied statistics group (with Sarah Berkemer). Elsewhere, I teach sociology of social networks at ENS/EHESS (with Maxime Cornet) and law and ethics of social and digital data at the University of Toulouse (with Marianne Prudet).

In Spring 2023, I am a By-Fellow of Churchill College, University of Cambridge, UK, and a visitor at the Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, also at the University of Cambridge.

I am a member of the Editorial Boards of Sociology and of Revue française de sociologie. I am an elected fellow of the European Academy of Sociology, and I co-convene the Social Networks Analysis Group of British Sociological Association.

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.

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.