The Department of Engineering and Information and Communication Technologies (DTIC) will host, on 18th October, the inaugural lesson of the new academic year 2022-2023.

This year, this event will be presented by Emmanuel Letouzé, a Marie Curie Fellow at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the co-Founder of Data-Pop Alliance, an NGO created in 2013 with the MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI). His work focuses on the applications and implications of data, statistics, technology and AI for development and democracy in the Global South, especially Latin America and the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle-East and the North Africa region.

He wrote UN Global Pulse’s White Paper on “Big Data for Development” (2012) where he worked as Senior Development Economist. Prior he worked as an Economist for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in New York (2006-09), and in Hanoi, Vietnam, for the French government as a Technical Assistant in official statistics with Vietnam’s General Statistics Office (2000-04). He served on the Program Committees of the 1st and 2nd editions of the UN World Data Forum in 2017-18 and was recently an appointed member of the European Commission’s high-level expert group on using private data for official statistics.

He holds a BA in Political Science (1997) and an MA in Applied Economics-Economic Demography (2000) from Sciences Po Paris, an MA in International Affairs-Economic Development (2006) from Columbia University, where he was a Fulbright Fellow, and a PhD  (2016) from the University of California, Berkeley, where his dissertation focused on cell-phone data analysis for demo-economic research, followed by a post-doctoral position (2016-17) with the MIT Media Lab. 

 “Applications and Implications of the "Data Revolution" for Development and Democracy”

One key question of our time is whether the "Data (and AI) Revolution" does and will promote or hinder development and democracy. The Data Revolution refers to the relatively recent explosion in the types and variety of digital data emitted about human actions and interactions and in the capacities and incentives to make sense of them, which created hopes of more evidence-based and reasoned public discussions and decisions, and overall of a better future. Instead, it seems that the age of data and AI is characterised by widening social inequities, political polarisation, and environmental degradation, raising legitimate doubts on the net effect of this “4th Industrial Revolution”, concerns over its trajectory, and questions about how to course-correct.

The lecture will provide an overview of the key drivers and features of the Data Revolution, its main promises, progress and pitfalls to date, and present a vision and options to make it a force of positive transformation”.