Rachel Thomas

Rachel Thomas is director of the USF Center for Applied Data Ethics and co-founder of fast.ai, which has been featured in The Economist, MIT Tech Review, and Forbes. She was selected by Forbes as one of 20 Incredible Women in AI, earned her math PhD at Duke, and was an early engineer at Uber. Rachel is a popular writer and keynote speaker.

Virginia Eubanks

Virginia Eubanks is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author of Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor; Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age; and co-editor, with Alethia Jones, of Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building with Barbara Smith. Her writing about technology and social justice has appeared in Scientific American, The Nation, Harper’s, and Wired. For two decades, Eubanks has worked in community technology and economic justice movements. She was a founding member of the Our Data Bodies Project and a 2016-2017 Fellow at New America. She lives in Troy, NY.

Cathy O’Neil

Cathy O’Neil is an American mathematician and the author of the blog mathbabe.org and several books on data science, including Weapons of Math Destruction She was the former Director of the Lede Program in Data Practices at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism‘s Tow Center and was employed as Data Science Consultant at Johnson Research Labs.

DJ Patil

DJ Patil is perhaps the most influential data scientist in the world. Having been appointed by President Obama as the very first U.S. Chief Data Scientist, he was tasked with making the largest organization in history—the U.S. Federal Government—a data driven enterprise.

Working directly with the highest ranking officials in government, DJ’s efforts led to the establishment of nearly 40 Chief Data Officer roles across a vast array of departments and programs. Patil’s experience in national security initiatives is extensive, and for his efforts was awarded by Secretary Carter the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service which the highest honor the department bestows on a civilian.

Brianna Schuyler, PhD

Brianna leads the data science team at Fenix International. Their work spans multiple countries, including the US, Uganda, Zambia, and Ivory Coast. She and the data team at Fenix work on a wide range of problems to help provide clean, safe, and sustainable energy to people living off the grid in Sub-Saharan Africa. She has a bachelor’s degree in Physics from Johns Hopkins University, a master’s degree in Physics from the University of Wisconsin – Madison, and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Wisconsin – Madison. After years of particle physics and functional MRI analyses, she took a break from academia and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Northern Uganda. She’s delighted to use her background in big data at the perfect crossroads of sustainable energy and energy access for underserved populations.

David Rolnick, PhD

David Rolnick is an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the mathematical foundations of deep learning. David is co-founder of Climate Change AI, an organization dedicated to furthering applications of machine learning that meaningfully address the climate crisis.

Jake Porway, PhD

A pioneer of the Data for Good movement, Jake Porway is an expert in the field of data and technology. As Founder and Executive Director of DataKind, a global nonprofit dedicated to using data science and AI in the service of humanity, he’s worked alongside the nonprofit community to drive social change with the power of data science since 2011. Jake’s career spans more than a decade in the data science sector as a statistician and computer scientist. He’s worked as a data scientist for The New York Times R&D Lab and was a research scientist studying machine learning and probabilistic modeling tasks with NASA, the Office of Naval Research, and other government agencies. A PopTech Social Innovation Fellow and a National Geographic Emerging Explorer, Jake was also noted as one of LinkedIn’s Next Wave Top Professionals 35 & Under, and his efforts have led to DataKind being named one of Fast Company’s Top 10 Most Innovative Nonprofits. Jake holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Statistics from UCLA.