Simón Gaviria
General Director, Departamento Nacional de Planeación

Simón Gaviria is an economist from the University of Pennsylvania specializing in mathematics, econometrics, and political sciences. Simón has written an award-winning thesis about pension reform. He served as a director of the Colombian Liberal Party. He was elected as member of the Chamber of Representatives of Colombia during two consecutive terms. In his early career, he worked as a financial analyst at J.P. Morgan Chase Corporate Finance in New York. Since August 2014, he has been the general director of the Departamento Nacional de Planeación (DNP) of Colombia.

As general director of the DNP, he has been a firm promoter of the widespread use of technologies to improve the government processes, reduce the social gaps, and increase productivity. He led the National Development Plan 2014 – 2018 “Todos por un Nuevo País”, where the national government´s commitment to the design and implementation of a national Big Data strategy, led by DNP, was established. With this strategy, he sees the opportunity to optimize the use of public funds and generate a greater impact in society through public policies.

Alex "Sandy" Pentland
Toshiba Professor of Media Arts & Sciences, MIT

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. Sandy 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. 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.

Eliuth Andrés Triana
Channel Market Development Manager, Intel

Eliuth Andrés is the system integrator and channel manager for Intel. He has more than 15 years in regional business development for Data Center, Cloud, Big Data, and Internet of Things solutions in multinational companies such as Red Hat, Google, and Telefónica. He holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science and an international MBA from ESIC Business & Marketing School in Spain. He participated in an MBA exchange program with the University of Shanghai in China, and has been associate professor for undergraduate and graduate programs in Colombian universities.

Marta González
Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, MIT

Marta González works in the area of urban computing, with a focus on the intersections of people with the built environment and their social networks. Her ultimate goal is to design urban mobility solutions and to enable the sustainable development of smart cities. Marta has injected new tools into transportation research and is a leader in the emergent field of urban computing.

Andrew Lo
Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor
Professor of Finance, MIT Sloan

Prior to MIT Sloan, Andrew Lo taught at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School as the W.P. Carey Assistant Professor of Finance from 1984 to 1987, and as the W.P. Carey Associate Professor of Finance from 1987 to 1988. His research interests include the empirical validation and implementation of financial asset pricing models; the pricing of options and other derivative securities; financial engineering and risk management; trading technology and market microstructure; statistics, econometrics, and stochastic processes; computer algorithms and numerical methods; financial visualization; nonlinear models of stock and bond returns; hedge-fund risk and return dynamics and risk transparency; and, most recently, evolutionary and neurobiological models of individual risk preferences and financial markets.

Elizabeth Bruce
Executive Director, Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, MIT

Elizabeth Bruce co-founded the MIT Big Data Initiative based in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). Launched in 2012, the MIT Big Data Initiative is driving innovation by bringing together researchers and collaborators in industry and government to develop new technologies needed to solve next generation data challenges.

Elizabeth expertise is in identifying emerging technologies and developing industry-university collaborations to bridge the gap between research and commercialization. She joined MIT CSAIL in May 2008 as director of industry partnerships and helped to establish and lead the CSAIL Industry Affiliates Program.

Roberto Rigobon
Society of Sloan Fellows Professor of Management
Professor of Applied Economics, MIT Sloan

Roberto Rigobon is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the Census Bureau’s Scientific Advisory Committee, and a visiting professor at IESA.

Roberto is a Venezuelan economist whose areas of research are international economics, monetary economics, and development economics. He focuses on the causes of balance-of-payments crises, financial crises, and the propagation of them across countries—the phenomenon that has been identified in the literature as contagion. Currently he studies properties of international pricing practices, trying to produce alternative measures of inflation.  He is one of the two founding members of the Billion Prices Project, and a co-founder of PriceStats.

Andrés Archila
Under Secretary of Sectoral Policy
Secretary of Mobility, Bogotá, Colombia

Andrés Felipe Archila earned his M.Sc in transportation from MIT and his B.Sc. in mechanical engineering from Universidad de los Andes. Before joining the Secretary of Mobility, Andrés worked in research and consultancy in transport policy, and contributed to some of the major media in the country on these issues. At MIT Andrés focused on regional transportation planning and megacity logistics, and became the first Colombian to win the MIT Carroll L. Wilson Award for his work on sustainable transportation development. At the Secretary of Mobility, Andrés plans to bring big data from promise to real practice.