Predicting the Future: Anticipating the World with Data

Drew Conway is a PhD student in political science at New York University. Drew studies terrorism and armed conflict; using tools from mathematics and computer science to gain a deeper understanding of these phenomena.

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Christopher Ahlberg is the CEO of Recorded Future, Inc., and is an independent director of Hult International Business School (Education), Apptus AB (Software), and Fina Technologies (Hedge fund), and advises a series of start up companies. Earlier Ahlberg was the president of the Spotfire Division of TIBCO, which he founded as an independent company in 1996 and in 2007 sold to TIBCO (Nasdaq: TIBX) for $195M in cash. Spotfire was founded based on his ground-breaking research on information visualization. Dr. Ahlberg earned his doctorate from Chalmers University of Technology, has worked as a visiting researcher at the University of Maryland, and has lectured and consulted extensively for industry, academia, military, and intelligence communities – as well as published & lectured in computer science, psychology, linguistics, biology, and chemistry. He has two granted software patents, and multiple patents pending. Dr. Ahlberg was named among the World’s Top 100 Young Innovators by Technology Review, MIT’s Magazine of Innovation in 2002.

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Robert McGrew is a Director of Engineering at Palantir. Robert is responsible for the architecture, user interface, and overall product direction of the government product. Prior to Palantir, Robert was a PhD candidate in computer science at Stanford, where he published papers on artificial intelligence, algorithmic game theory, and reputation systems. He has also been a software engineer at PayPal where he designed and implemented systems to cryptographically secure sensitive customer data in fraud processing and complaint resolution.

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Rion Snow leads a team building relevance and discovery technologies at Twitter. Before joining Twitter, he pioneered award-winning research in natural language processing, machine learning, and human computation. Rion received his Ph.D in Computer Science from Stanford, his B.A. in Mathematics from UCSD, and has previously worked for numerous research labs and startups, including Google Research, Microsoft Research, and Powerset.

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