Bio
Sinan Aral
Sinan Aral‘s research focuses on social contagion, measuring and managing how information diffusion in massive social networks affects information worker productivity, consumer demand, and viral marketing. He also studies the role of information and information technology in the productivity and performance of firms. Sinan’s work has been published or is forthcoming in American Journal of Sociology, the Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, among many others. He is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Northwestern, holds an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics, and an M.P.P. from Harvard.
Prior to MIT, Sinan was a Fulbright Scholar and worked at the European Commission in Brussels and as a technology consultant for several Fortune 500 firms.
Hashem Bajwa
Hashem Bajwa is the CEO of DE-DE, a new technology development studio driven by a unique combination of engineers and marketers who build products that can become sustainable businesses. DE-DE, which stands for Design & Develop, is based in New York and is the studio behind Thunderclap, the first-ever crowdspeaking platform. Prior to founding DE-DE, Hashem was director of digital strategy at creative advertising agency Droga5, where he was part of the core team that developed the award-winning “Decode Jay-Z with Bing” campaign. He began his career in global communications at the United Nations.
Miki Berardelli
Since joining Tory Burch as Chief Marketing Officer in 2009, Miki Berardelli has been responsible for global marketing, public relations, CRM, and e-commerce.
Prior to joining Tory Burch, Ms. Berardelli was Senior Vice President of Marketing at Ralph Lauren, where she spent nearly eight years developing and leading multichannel marketing strategy for the retail businesses.
Earlier in her career, Ms. Berardelli held positions at
Limited Too/Tween Brands, Experian North America,
and McMillan Associates.Ms. Berardelli is actively involved in Shop.org, the digital division of the National Retail Federation, where she is currently serving her third term on the board of directors as Chairman. In 2011, she also joined the board of directors for Giggle Inc., a multichannel baby products and lifestyle retail brand.
Ms. Berardelli earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa and a master’s degree from Northwestern University. She was recognized in 2011 as one of the “Top Women in Cross-Channel Retail.”
Vasant Dhar
Vasant Dhar’s longstanding research has been on building robust automated decision making systems from large databases based on principles and methods from Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and related disciplines. The emphasis is on predictive modeling, across areas that span financial markets and other domains including economic networks, news, sponsored search markets, blogs and other user generated content.
His more recent research has been on corporate governance of data and information technologies that balance their simultaneous benefits and risks, and on the transformational aspects of these technologies in business and society. Vasant has written over 70 articles, funded by grants from industry and the NSF. He pioneered the use of machine learning for predictive modeling on Wall Street and teaches courses on Trading Strategies, and IT and Corporate Strategy.
Jessica Hagy
Jessica Hagy is an artist and writer best known for her award-winning blog, Indexed (www.thisisindexed.com). A fixture in the creative online space, Jessica has been illustrating, consulting, and speaking contributing to international media and events since 2006.
Her work has been described as “deceptively simple,” “undeniably brilliant,” and “our favorite reason for the Internet to exist.” She mixes philosophical concepts with humor and simple visuals, making even the most complex concepts immediately accessible and relevant.
Her next book How to be Interesting will be released in 2013 by Workman Publishing.
Jonathan Haidt
Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) is a social psychologist at the NYU Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992, and spent most of his career (1995–2011) at the University of Virginia. Jonathan’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures. In recent years he has examined the moral cultures of liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. Jonathan is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis, and of the The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
Kellee Khalil
Erez Lieberman Aiden
Erez Lieberman Aiden is a fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and Visiting Faculty at Google. His research spans many disciplines and has won numerous awards, including recognition for one of the top 20 "Biotech Breakthroughs that will Change Medicine", by Popular Mechanics; the Lemelson-MIT prize for the best student inventor at MIT; the American Physical Society's Award for the Best Doctoral Dissertation in Biological Physics; and membership in Technology Review's 2009 TR35, recognizing the top 35 innovators under 35. His last three papers -- two with JB Michel -- have all appeared on the cover of Nature and Science.
Anh Ly
Anh Ly is user experience designer for Bing’s Future Experiences team where she develops radical new ideas for search. Anh graduated from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) where she created, among other things, a sandbox where you can physically dig for virtual dinosaurs and a mobile app that uses augmented reality to help people fix cars. Last summer, she worked as an interaction designer for Microsoft Research, developing a mobile platform for people to record and share stories. Prior to that, Anh was a multimedia producer and visual journalist for MSN Money, where she ate her way through stories such as “The $1,000 Sundae” and “The $1,000 Omelete” (it was delicious, but a little rich for her taste). Anh’s background in journalism led her to believe that everybody and every object has a story, so she tries to tell these stories through her designs. A native of the foothills of North Carolina, you’ll catch Anh’s southern twang when she gets overly excited. Anh is a fan of traveling, tango dancing and almost all food, except for papayas.
Robert McLaughlin
I was born in Killingworth, CT June 15th, 1997. My family moved to New Jersey in 2001. Both of my parents are musical, having met at a church folk group, playing guitar. My whole family is musical and artistic. So naturally I inherited this love for music. I first heard about throat singing when I was in seventh grade, I was studying the Mongols, and my Dad who is into physics told me about the late Richard Feynman. He also taught me about the polyphonic singing that was done in Tuva. So I went on the computer and looked up a video of throat singing. I was amazed, I had to learn how to do this, singing with two voices at the same time. I have been teaching myself throat singing for the past two and a half years. I also recently started building Tuvan traditional instruments. I have also befriended many Tuvan musicians, and I attend their concerts whenever I can. I am honored to represent this little-known Central Asian style of music, and to spread the almost magical culture of these people.
Jean-Baptiste Michel
Jean-Baptiste Michel holds joint academic appointments at Harvard (FQEB Fellow) and Google (Visiting Faculty). His research focusses on using large volumes of data as tools that help better understand the world around us—from the way diseases progress in patients over years, to the way cultures change in human societies over centuries. With his colleague Erez Lieberman Aiden, Jean-Baptiste is a Founding Director of Harvard’s Cultural Observatory, where their research team pioneers the use of quantitative methods for the study of human culture, language, and history. His research was featured on the covers of Science and Nature, on the front pages of the New York Times and the Boston Globe, in The Economist, Wired and many other venues. The online tool he helped create—ngrams.googlelabs.com—was used millions of times to browse cultural trends. Jean-Baptiste is an Engineer from Ecole Polytechnique (Paris), and holds an MS in Applied Mathematics and a PhD in Systems Biology from Harvard.
Damian Mould
Maureen Mullen
Maureen Mullen leads L2’s research and advisory group and has benchmarked and/or developed digital and social media initiatives for over 300 prestige brands. She began her career at Triage Consulting Group in San Francisco. At Triage, she led several managed care payment review and payment bench- marking projects for hospitals including UCLA Medical Center, UCSF, and HCA. She has gone on to lead research and consulting efforts focused on digital media, private banking, M&A, insurance industry risk management, and renewable energy economics for professional firms and academics. Maureen has a B.A. in Human Biology from Stanford University and an M.B.A. from NYU Stern.
Eddie Opara
Eddie Opara is a designer whose work encompasses strategy, design, and technology. His projects have included the design of interactive installations, websites, user interfaces and software, brand identity, publications, packaging, and environments, with many of his projects ranging across multiple media.
He has taught at RISD, the Columbia University School of Architecture, and the Yale University School of Art. He is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale, and on the board of the New York Chapter of AIGA. Opara was featured in Ebony Magazine’s most recent ‘Power 100 Black American’ list as well as Fast Company’s 2012 ‘100 Most Creative People in Business’.
Opara studied graphic design at the London College of Printing and received an M.F.A. from Yale.
Carolyn Parent
Carolyn Parent is an accomplished leader in business development, innovative technology and digital/mobile marketing solutions. Carolyn recently co-founded timeRAZOR, the dynamic hyper local events app which gives users the scoop on tons of things to do near where they live, work and play. Currently a top five ranked Lifestyle App delivering the largest event and venue database in the US, business partners include L’Oreal, Universal, Eddie Bauer and dozens of others.
As timeRAZOR’s Chief Experience Officer, Carolyn works with leading brands in retail, sports and entertainment to amplify their experiential and event marketing efforts. Leveraging timeRAZOR’s knowWHERE predictive technology, consumers are activated based on where they’ll be. Brands receive valuable analytics around social effectiveness for smarter remarketing. Carolyn is now at the intersection of consumers having fun with brands optimizing experiential campaigns…her dream job! Prior to launching timeRAZOR, Carolyn was EVP/GM at Deltek, a leading technology company, where she helped Deltek become the fastest growing company in the software industry and complete a successful IPO.
Deb Roy
Deb Roy has over 20 years of research experience in machine intelligence, cognitive science, and media convergence combined with a long history of transitioning research concepts into commercial use. He is a tenured member of the MIT faculty where he pioneered research on understanding and modeling human behavior using big data. A frequent speaker at industry and academic events, Roy’s TED talk was the most viewed TED talk of 2011. A native of Canada, he received his bachelor of computer engineering from the University of Waterloo and his PhD in cognitive science from MIT. He is currently on leave from MIT.
Rick Smolan
Rick Smolan is a photographer, explorer and natural storyteller. A former photographer for Time Magazine, Life Magazine and National Geographic and Founder of Against All Odds, a production company that specializes in global photographic projects, Smolan has long been a force for exploring culture through photography.
Smolan created The Day in the Life photography series, best-selling photo books that captured life around the world, and ”America 24/7″, the largest photographic event in U.S. history where 1,000 top photojournalists were sent across the United States for a week to create an extraordinary snapshot of American life. Smolan’s most recent project is The Human Face of Big Data, a project that dispatched one hundred leading photographers around the globe to capture how Big Data is enabling us to address humanity’s biggest challenges.
Caroline Van Sickle
Caroline Van Sickle is the Founder and CEO of Pretty in my Pocket (PRIMP), a free social and mobile app that helps consumers shop for beauty products. PRIMP’s technology collects valuable consumer data that provides brands and retailers with insight into their consumer’s shopping preferences. Prior to launching Pretty in my Pocket, Caroline worked in marketing and advertising at agencies and publishers such as Time Warner Media Properties. Caroline was chosen to participate in NYC’s Springboard Enterprises Accelerator program of 2012, Venture Atlanta 2012, Startup Riot 2010, and SBA’s Young Entrepreneur Summit in 2011. Pretty in my Pocket won first place in Startup Chicks’ 2011 pitch competition. Caroline graduated Cum Laude from the MIS Program at the University of Georgia and received her MBA at Emory University.
