Cesar A. Hidalgo

César A. Hidalgo leads the Collective Learning group (formerly Macro Connections) and is an associate professor in the program in media arts and sciences at MIT.

Hidalgo's research focuses on collective learning–the learning taking place in teams, organizations, and economies. With his group, he develops analytical tools and models to understanding how collective learning takes place, and also, they design tools to help improve the collective learning of organizations. 

These tools include The Observatory of Economic Complexity (the world's leading visualization engine for international trade data), Pantheon (a platform mapping human collective memory), DataViva (a platform visualizing economic data for all of Brazil), Immersion (a tool to visualize personal email networks), DataUSA (the most comprehensive effort to visualize US public data), and DIVE (a generalized tool designed to transform any dataset into a story). 

A native of Santiago de Chile and a permanent resident of the US, Hidalgo is the only hispanic faculty of the MIT Media Lab. He holds a PhD in physics from the University of Notre Dame and a bachelor's degree in physics from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Hidalgo is the author of Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies (Basic Books, 2015), and a co-author of The Atlas of Economic Complexity (MIT, Press 2011).