 Emmanuel Letouzé
(Data-Pop Alliance and MIT Media Lab, USA)
Dr Emmanuel Letouzé is the Director of Data-Pop Alliance, a global coalition on Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and development created in 2013 by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI), MIT Media Lab and Overseas Development Institute (ODI), joined by Flowminder in 2016. He is a co-founder and serves as Executive Director of the Open Algorithms (OPAL) project and is a Visiting Scholar at MIT Media Lab. He wrote UN Global Pulse's White Paper "Big Data for Development” in 2011 and has since then focused on new data’s applications and implications for development, including official statistics. He worked as an Economist for UNDP in New York (2006-09) on fiscal policy, post-conflict recovery and migration, and in Vietnam for the French Ministry of Finance as a technical assistant in public finance and official statistics (2000-04). He holds a BA in Political Science and an MA in Economic Demography from Sciences Po Paris, an MA in International Affairs-Economic Development from Columbia University, where he was a Fulbright Fellow, and a PhD in Demography from the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a political cartoonist for various media.
 Alex Pentland
(MIT and Data-Pop Alliance, USA)
Professor Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland is Toshiba Professor of Arts and Sciences at MIT where he directs the MIT Media Lab Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program. He also serves as Academic Director of Data-Pop Alliance, co-leads the World Economic Forum Big Data and Personal Data initiatives, and is a member of the Advisory Boards for Nissan, Motorola Mobility, Google, Telefonica, and a variety of start-up firms.
He has previously helped create and direct MIT’s Media Laboratory, the Media Lab Asia laboratories at the Indian Institutes of Technology, and Strong Hospital’s Center for Future Health.
In 2012 Forbes named Sandy one of the ‘seven most powerful data scientists in the world’, along with Google founders and the CTO of the United States He is among the most-cited computational scientists in the world, and a pioneer in computational social science, organizational engineering, wearable computing (Google Glass), image understanding, and modern biometrics. His research has been featured in Nature, Science, and Harvard Business Review, as well as being the focus of TV features on BBC World, Discover and Science channels. His most recent book is `Social Physics,’ published by The Penguin Press.
Sandy’s research group and entrepreneurship program have spun off more than 30 companies to date, three of which are publicly listed and several that serve millions of poor in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. Recent spin-offs have been featured in publications such as the Economist and the New York Times, as well as winning a variety of prizes from international development organizations. |
