Dr Niccolò Pescetelli

About
Niccolo is a behavioural and data scientist. He has a DPhil in experimental psychology from the University of Oxford and previously worked at the MIT Media Lab and the Max Planck Institute. Niccolo’s work in collective intelligence investigates how people and machines work in groups and how collectives can be smarter than individuals. Applications of his research inform how to design better collaboration platforms and governance tools. Niccolo is also the co-founder and Chief Scientist of PSi (https://psi.tech), a collective intelligence platform to rapidly host and analyse online conversations among hundreds of people.
News
Last year, Niccolo worked with the Mayor of London’s Office, Black Thrive Global (a think tank), and PSi (an online platform) on a large-scale public consultation with Black Londoners on public attitudes toward community-led police scrutiny and accountability. More recently, he was involved in a collaboration with Transport for London (TfL).
Teaching
Niccolo teaches data science and machine learning to year 2 and 3 students (undergraduate programme). In the graduate programme, he teaches Python programming, experimental methods, and survey design.
Research
Niccolo researches collective intelligence and group decision-making in humans and machines. His work focuses on understanding and designing collaborative systems blending human and machine intelligence. Niccolo is the founder and chief scientist of PSi, an online platform to host and analyse real-time online conversations at massive scales. His research has been published by top peer-reviewed journals and was featured on the international press (BBC, Business Insider, Forbes, El Pais).
Selected publications:
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-02001-8
- https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2022.0736
- https://doi.org/10.1177/26339137221126915
- https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2020.0426
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-23424-1