Welcoming Jake Porway to our Advisory Board!

I'm really thrilled to announce that Jake Porway has joined our Advisory Board! I had the good fortune of first meeting Jake at National Geographic back in 2012. Jake uses big data and machine learning to tackle big social problems. As the founder of DataKind, he connects — and acts as an accessible bridge between — data scientists and not-for-profit companies. Jake was most recently the data scientist in the New York Times R&D lab and remains an active member of the data science community. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Statistics from UCLA.

Our growing network of Flying Labs in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the South Pacific are collecting more and more aerial data as part of their social good projects. This explains why we're increasingly focused on data analysis and on connecting said analysis to decision-making.

Take our Open AI Challenge with the World Bank and OpenAerialMap, for example. This challenge is part of a series of AI challenges that we'll be running on a regular basis. The purpose is to develop machine learning classifiers for the automated detection of features relevant to the decision-making needs of aid, development, environmental and public health organizations. Jake's guidance on this and other data science projects at WeRobotics will be absolutely invaluable. So please help us welcome to Jake to the team!