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Zoubin Ghahramani FRS is Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Cambridge, where he leads the Machine Learning Group, and the Cambridge Liaison Director of the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for Data Science. He studied computer science and cognitive science at the University of Pennsylvania, obtained his PhD from MIT in 1995, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto. His academic career includes concurrent appointments as one of the founding members of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit in London, and as a faculty member of CMU's Machine Learning Department for over 10 years.  His current research interests include statistical machine learning, Bayesian nonparametrics, scalable inference, probabilistic programming, and building an automatic statistician.

Kentaro Toyama is W. K. Kellogg Associate Professor at University of Michigan’s School of Information.  Until 2009, he was assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, which he co-founded in 2005. At MSR India, he started the Technology for Emerging Markets research group, which conducts interdisciplinary research to understand how the world’s poorer communities interact with electronic technology and to invent new ways for technology to support their socio-economic development. 

Lydia Nicholas is a Senior Researcher in Nesta’s Collective Intelligence team, exploring new forms of knowledge production and problem solving that are emerging from the collaboration of networked publics, institutions and organisations. Lydia’s work looks at how minds, systems and technologies come together to perform better at cognitive challenges with particular focus on health and patient organisations. Before joining Nesta Lydia worked as a researcher across technology sectors, with particular focus on medical and biological information. She has an MSc in Digital Anthropology and wrote her thesis on public understanding of Big Data and data collection practices.