Workshop
Friday, June 1, 2012 - 2:15 pm
Data and Global Development
Executive Director
Internews Center for Innovation and Learning
Frohardt has worked for years on the rapid delivery of life-saving information to populations after natural disasters and instability. His focus is the gathering and sharing of expertise on humanitarian media – including the use of information tools such as crisis mapping, crowd-sourcing and mobile technologies – to ensure that local media can communicate better with disaster-affected communities.
For twenty years prior to joining Internews, Frohardt's career in humanitarian relief had him working around the world, including: coordinating health services for refugees on the Thai-Cambodian border; working for Doctors Without Borders in Chad and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Sudan and Somalia; assisting with the repatriation of Kurds into northern Iraq after the first Gulf War; consulting in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war; and managing UN human rights field operations in Rwanda following the genocide.
Since joining Internews in 1999, Frohardt has provided important leadership as Vice-President for Africa, and Health and Humanitarian Media, and continues his work promoting and implementing life-saving information systems in areas that are affected by natural disasters, armed conflict and social upheaval.
Assistant Professor
UC Berkeley School of Information
Tapan Parikh’s research focuses on the use of computing to support sustainable economic development across the world. His interests include microfinance, agriculture, public health, human-computer interaction, mobile computing, and distributed information systems.
Principal Data Scientist
LinkedIn
Peter Skomoroch is a principal data scientist at LinkedIn, where he leads a team focused on identity, reputation, information extraction, and building data-driven products. He was also the creator of LinkedIn Skills. Prior to LinkedIn, he was based in Washington, D.C., where he mined insights from search query data as the director of advanced analytics at Juice Analytics and as a senior research engineer at AOL Search. While in D.C., he also founded DataWrangling.com, which provided custom data mining solutions to clients in bioinformatics, finance, and cloud computing. He spent the previous 6 years in Boston implementing Biodefense pattern detection algorithms for streaming sensor data at MIT Lincoln Laboratory and constructing predictive models for large retail datasets at Profitlogic (now Oracle Retail). Skomoroch has a B.S. in mathematics and physics from Brandeis University and did graduate coursework in machine learning at MIT.
Chief Information Officer
Energy for Opportunity
Robert Munro is a computational linguist working in communication technologies, especially in less-resourced languages. His research covers a broad area of technological and social development, from crowdsourcing and machine-learning for extracting rich information from natural language to the installation of supporting infrastructures. He is a graduate fellow at Stanford University, the Chief Information Officer of Energy for Opportunity, and a consultant to various organizations globally. He also writes an occasional article at Jungle Light Speed.