Daniel Verdi

I'm a Computational Social Scientist

About me

Bridging Data & Society

I’m a PhD student at Stanford University studying computational social science with a focus on science of science, social computing, and human-centered AI. My research examines communication and governance in scientific and socio-technical systems through data science techniques like natural language processing (NLP).

I’m particularly interested in how algorithmic systems like AI and social media are changing information ecosystems and how their own risks and benefits are transmitted to the public. A focus of my research is how scientific ideas, political narratives, and technological discourses are translated for public audiences and popularized through digital media. At the core of my work is a commitment to questions of equity, ethics, and social justice.

Through this work, I seek to inform the development of technologies and policies that promote more informed and inclusive societies. Beyond conducting research, I am also passionate about designing tools and events to put science in conversation with communities and create opportunities for marginalized students to engage with research and technology.

My approach is grounded in diverse interdisciplinary and international experiences combining technical knowledge and societal relevance. Before Stanford, I conducted research at world-class institutions like Carnegie Mellon, University of Southern California, and the University of Copenhagen, besides an industry internship at Amazon Alexa AI. I also proudly co-founded one of Brazil's largest high school science fairs, the Brazilian Fair of Young Scientists (FBJC), which has engaged over 2,000 participants and received over 1M website visits.

Updates

  • (Mar. 2025) Admitted into multiple graduate schools
  • Super happy and grateful to have been admitted to several amazing universities, including Master's programs at Harvard and Columbia, as well as PhD programs at Stanford, Northwestern, University of Washington, UC Irvine, and University of Maryland. I accepted Stanford's offer and will start my PhD in the fall!

  • (Sep. 2024) Studying abroad in Milan!
  • I'll spend my last semester of college in Italy. Excited to take interesting classes, explore Italian language and culture, and conduct research with Dr. Francesco Pierri at Politecnico di Milano.

  • (Aug. 2024) Presented at KDD-UC 2024 🔗
  • The ACM KDD Conference is one of the leading international events on AI and data mining. As a Undergraduate Consortium participant, I learned more about a research career, presented a poster, and attended several sessions about topics like responsible AI and generative AI applications.

  • (Jul. 2024) Research presented and published 🔗
  • My research paper has been published at Revista Educação Pública, in a special issue about science fairs! Before that, my co-author Kritim also presented the project at the International Conference of Computational Social Science (IC2S2) in Philadelphia.

Publications

Statistical Analysis of the Influence of Socio-Demographic Factors on Scores and Awards in a Science Fair

Venue: Educação Pública - Divulgação Científica e Ensino de Ciências, v3, n1: Dossiê de Feira de Ciências. 2024.
Authors: Verdi do Amarante, Daniel; Rijal, Kritim.
📄 Paper PDF 💻 Code

Assessment of the E3C corpus for the recognition of disorders in clinical texts.

Venue: Natural Language Engineering Journal. Cambridge University Press. 2023.
Authors: Zanoli, Roberto; Lavelli, Alberto; Verdi do Amarante, Daniel; Toti, Daniele.
📄 Paper PDF

Argument Mining for Review Helpfulness Prediction

Venue: Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 8914–8922, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics. 2022.
Authors: Chen, Zaiqian; Verdi do Amarante, Daniel; Donaldson, Jenna; Jo, Yohan; Park, Joonsuk.
📄 Paper PDF

Contact

Email

daniel.verdidoamarante [at] richmond.edu