PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Miguel Romero

Also known as Miguel Romero Orth

Miguel Romero is a theoretical computer scientist whose work on graph databases and constraint satisfaction grew into research on the expressive power of graph neural networks and on formal explanations of machine-learning models. After a 2016 PhD at Universidad de Chile under Pablo Barceló, he was a Simons Institute research fellow and an Oxford postdoctoral researcher under Standa Živný. In 2022, he coauthored Weisfeiler and Leman Go Relational with Barceló, Mikhail Galkin and Christopher Morris, and his 2025 paper Explaining k-Nearest Neighbors won a PODS Distinguished Paper Award. He shared the 2026 Alonzo Church Award for the foundations of property-graph query languages. At Universidad Católica de Chile, he is an assistant professor and a young researcher at CENIA, the National Center for Artificial Intelligence.

Timeline

  1. 2012–2016

    A PhD on graph databases

    He earns a mathematical engineering degree and, in 2012, a master's degree in computer science at Universidad de Chile. In 2016, he completes his PhD there under Pablo Barceló, on query languages for graph databases.

  2. 2015–2017

    Regular queries on graph databases

    With Juan L. Reutter and Moshe Y. Vardi, he presents Regular Queries on Graph Databases at ICDT 2015. The journal version appears in Theory of Computing Systems in 2017.

  3. 2016

    Simons Institute research fellow

    In fall 2016, he is a Research Fellow in the Logical Structures in Computation program at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing.

  4. By 2019

    Postdoc at Oxford

    He works as a postdoctoral research assistant in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford under Standa Živný, on constraint satisfaction problems, and leaves the post in October 2019. With Clément Carbonnel and Živný, he presents The complexity of general-valued CSPs seen from the other side at FOCS 2018.

  5. 2022–2025

    Expressiveness of graph neural networks

    In 2022, he coauthors Weisfeiler and Leman Go Relational with Pablo Barceló, Mikhail Galkin and Christopher Morris, which aligns Relational GCN and Compositional GCN with a version of the Weisfeiler-Leman test to show when the two models have the same expressive power. A Theory of Link Prediction via Relational Weisfeiler-Leman on Knowledge Graphs, with Xingyue Huang, İsmail İlkan Ceylan and Barceló, appears at NeurIPS 2023 and characterizes the expressive power of graph neural networks for link prediction. At ICML 2025, he and Huang, Barceló, Michael M. Bronstein, Ceylan, Galkin and Juan L. Reutter show that the expressive power of knowledge graph foundation models depends on the motifs used to learn relation representations.

  6. 2022–2025

    Formal explanations of classifiers

    In 2022, he coauthors On Computing Probabilistic Explanations for Decision Trees with Marcelo Arenas, Pablo Barceló and Bernardo Subercaseaux, a formal explainable-AI paper that settles the computational complexity of probabilistic sufficient reasons for decision trees. In 2025, Explaining k-Nearest Neighbors: Abductive and Counterfactual Explanations, which maps the complexity of abductive and counterfactual explanations for nearest-neighbor classifiers, wins a Distinguished Paper Award at PODS 2025.

  7. 2025–2026

    Test-of-Time and Church awards

    Regular Queries on Graph Databases, written with Juan Reutter and Moshe Vardi, receives the ICDT 2025 Test-of-Time Award, and Minimizing Conjunctive Regular Path Queries, written with Diego Figueira and Rémi Morvan, receives a PODS 2025 Distinguished Paper Award. In 2026, he shares the Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation with Pablo Barceló, Leonid Libkin, Wim Martens, Juan Reutter, Moshe Vardi and Domagoj Vrgoč, for laying the foundations of logical languages for querying property graphs.

  8. As of October 2026

    Assistant professor at Universidad Católica

    He is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago and a young researcher at CENIA, the National Center for Artificial Intelligence; an assistant professorship at Adolfo Ibáñez University came before. His interests cover theoretical computer science, data management and machine learning. In 2025, the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research publishes his paper on probabilistic explanations for decision trees, written with Marcelo Arenas, Pablo Barceló, Alexander Kozachinskiy and Bernardo Subercaseaux.

Career

  1. NowPontifical Catholic University of ChileAssistant Professor
  2. NowNational Center for Artificial IntelligenceYoung Researcher
  3. Until 2019University of OxfordPostdoctoral Research Assistant
  4. 2016Simons Institute for the Theory of ComputingResearch Fellow
  5. Adolfo Ibáñez UniversityAssistant Professor

Education

  1. 2016University of ChilePhD
  2. 2012University of ChileMathematical Engineering degree

From the biography.

  1. The United States employs an estimated 48% of people shaping AIIncludes National Center for Artificial Intelligence. We estimate where the people shaping AI work today, how universities, companies and research institutes split across countries, and how country shares have changed since the 1960s.
  2. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  3. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes University of California, Berkeley. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.
  4. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes University of California, Berkeley. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Miguel Romero yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Miguel Romero simons.berkeley.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Miguel Romero Orth Home Page mromero.cl. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Miguel Romero Orth Home Page mromero.cl. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Winner of the 2026 Alonzo Church Award siglog.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Miguel Romero | Department of Computer Science cs.ox.ac.uk. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Weisfeiler and Leman Go Relational arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. A Theory of Link Prediction via Relational Weisfeiler-Leman on Knowledge Graphs proceedings.neurips.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. How Expressive are Knowledge Graph Foundation Models? proceedings.mlr.press. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. On Computing Probabilistic Explanations for Decision Trees arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. Explaining k-Nearest Neighbors: Abductive and Counterfactual Explanations arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. Paper Award at PODS 2025 | LaBRI labri.fr. Checked 21 October 2026.