by BGF | Jun 24, 2019 | Uncategorized
George F. Colony Professor of Computer Science; Harvard College Professor
Parkes leads research at the interface between economics and computer science, with a focus on multi-agent systems, artificial intelligence and machine learning. This is a vibrant field, encompassing questions about market design, dynamic pricing, preference elicitation, digital currency, reputation, and the increasing role that artificial intelligences will play in mediating transactions of all kinds.
Parkes founded the EconCS research group within the Paulson School, and is co-director of the Harvard University Data Science Initiative, and co-chair of the Harvard Business Analytics certificate program and the FAS Data Science Masters. Earlier, Parkes was Area Dean for Computer Science, 2013-2017. He served on the inaugural panel of the “Stanford 100 Year Study on Artificial Intelligence,” co-organized the 2016 OSTP Workshop on “AI for Social Good,” and served as chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce (2011-16). Since 2018, Parkes has served on the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) of the Computing Research Association.
Parkes is Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and recipient of the 2017 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award, the NSF Career Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, the Thouron Scholarship, and the Roslyn Abramson Award for Teaching. Parkes has degrees from the University of Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania, serves on several international scientific advisory boards, and is a technical advisor to a number of start-ups.
by BGF | Jun 24, 2019 | Uncategorized
Liam Byrne is a writer, reformer and campaigner who has been the (Labour) MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill since 2004. A former Cabinet minister he served in the Home Office, No 10 Downing Street and Her Majesty’s Treasury. He is the author of Dragons: Ten Entrepreneurs Who Built Britain; Black Flag Down: Counter Extremism, Defeating ISIS and Winning the Battle of Ideas; and Turning to Face the East.
Liam graduated at the top of his class at Manchester University, winning the Robert Mackenzie prize for political science and the leadership of Manchester Student Union, before going onto to win a Fulbright scholarship to the Harvard Business School where he took his MBA with honours.
After founding a high growth technology start-up, he won the tightly fought Hodge Hill by-election in 2004 and was asked to undertake some of the hardest jobs in government – in the Home Office, Downing Street and HM Treasury, creating the UK Border Agency, reorganising No 10 for Gordon Brown, and drawing up Labour’s deficit reduction plan for Alistair Darling.
In Opposition, Liam has chaired Labour’s policy review, led the Shadow Work and Pensions team, and served as the Shadow Minister for Universities, Science and Skills. Today, he chairs the cross-party think tank on progressive economics, Inclusive Growth and is the Shadow Digital Minister.
Liam has written extensively about economic history, development and foreign affairs. His history of British capitalism Dragons: Ten Entrepreneurs Who Built Britain was published in 2016. He is also the author of Black Flag Down: Counter Extremism, Defeating ISIS and Winning the Battle of Ideas; and Turning to Face the East: How Britain Prospers in the Asian Century.
He is board member of the Great Britain China Centre, and governor of the Institute of Government and lives in Birmingham with Sarah, their children and a highly excitable English pointer.
by BGF | Jun 4, 2019 | Uncategorized
Member of AIWS Standards and Practice Committee, Michael Dukakis Institute
Professor of Physics, MIT
A native of Stockholm, Tegmark left Sweden in 1990 after receiving his B.Sc. in Physics from the Royal Institute of Technology (he’d earned a B.A. in Economics the previous year at the Stockholm School of Economics). His first academic venture beyond Scandinavia brought him to California, where he studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley, earning his M.A. in 1992, and Ph.D. in 1994.
After four years of west coast living, Tegmark returned to Europe and accepted an appointment as a research associate with the Max-Planck-Institut für Physik in Munich. In 1996 he headed back to the U.S. as a Hubble Fellow and member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Tegmark remained in New Jersey for a few years until an opportunity arrived to experience the urban northeast with an Assistant Professorship at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received tenure in 2003.
He extended the east coast experiment and moved north of Philly to the shores of the Charles River (Cambridge-side), arriving at MIT in September 2004. He is married to Meia-Chita Tegmark and has two sons, Philip and Alexander.
Tegmark is an author on more than two hundred technical papers, and has featured in dozens of science documentaries. He has received numerous awards for his research, including a Packard Fellowship (2001-06), Cottrell Scholar Award (2002-07), and an NSF Career grant (2002-07), and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. His work with the SDSS collaboration on galaxy clustering shared the first prize in Science magazine’s “Breakthrough of the Year: 2003.”
by BGF | Jun 4, 2019 | Uncategorized
Member of AIWS Standards and Practice Committee, Michael Dukakis Institute
Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy, Harvard Kennedy School
Former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for US President Barack Obama
Jason Furman is Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. He is also nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. This followed eight years as a top economic adviser to President Obama, including serving as the 28th Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from August 2013 to January 2017, acting as both President Obama’s chief economist and a member of the cabinet. During this time Furman played a major role in most of the major economic policies of the Obama Administration. Previously Furman held a variety of posts in public policy and research.
In public policy, Furman worked at both the Council of Economic Advisers and National Economic Council during the Clinton administration and also at the World Bank.
In research, Furman was a Director of the Hamilton Project and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and also has served in visiting positions at various universities, including NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Policy. Furman has conducted research in a wide range of areas, including fiscal policy, tax policy, health economics, Social Security, technology policy, and domestic and international macroeconomics.
In addition to articles in scholarly journals and periodicals, Furman is the editor of two books on economic policy. Furman holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University.
by BGF | Jun 2, 2019 | AI World Society Summit, AI World Society Distinguished Lecture
AI World Society is pleased to announce that Professor Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland, a distinguished scholar at MIT, will join us as a member of the AIWS Standards and Practice Committee. He will also be speaking at the AIWS Summit on June 11, 2019.
Professor Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland directs the MIT Connection Science and Human Dynamics labs and previously helped create and direct the MIT Media Lab and the Media Lab Asia in India. He is one of the most-cited scientists in the world, and Forbes recently declared him one of the “7 most powerful data scientists in the world” along with Google founders and the Chief Technical Officer of the United States. co-led the World Economic Forum discussion in Davos that led to the EU privacy regulation GDPR, and was central in forging the transparency and accountability mechanisms in the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. He has received numerous awards and prizes such as the McKinsey Award from Harvard Business Review, the 40th Anniversary of the Internet from DARPA, and the Brandeis Award for work in privacy.
He is a founding member of advisory boards for Google, AT&T, Nissan, and the UN Secretary General, a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded more than a dozen companies including social enterprises such as the Data Transparency Lab and the Harvard-ODI-MIT DataPop Alliance . He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and leader within the World Economic Forum.
Over the years Sandy has advised more than 60 PhD students. Almost half are now tenured faculty at leading institutions, with another one-quarter leading industry research groups and a final quarter founders of their own companies. Together Sandy and his students have pioneered computational social science, organizational engineering, wearable computing (Google Glass), image understanding, and modern biometrics. His most recent books are Social Physics, published by Penguin Press, and Honest Signals, published by MIT Press.
Interesting experiences include dining with British Royalty and the President of India, staging fashion shows in Paris, Tokyo, and New York, and developing a method for counting beavers from space.
