EVENT AT FULL CAPACITY

Speaker Bio:

Image

Anders Aslund has been a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute since 2006. He is also an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. He examines the economic policy of Russia, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe, as well as focuses on the broader implications of economic transition. He worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1994 to 2005, first as a senior associate and then from 2003 as director of the Russian and Eurasian Program. He also worked at the Brookings Institution and the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies. He earned his doctorate from Oxford University. Åslund served as an economic adviser to the governments of Russia in 1991–94 and Ukraine in 1994–97. He was a professor at the Stockholm School of Economics and the founding director of the Stockholm Institute of East European Economics. He has worked as a Swedish diplomat in Kuwait, Poland, Geneva, and Moscow. He is a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and an honorary professor of the Kyrgyz National University. He is chairman of the Advisory Council of the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE), Warsaw, and of the Scientific Council of the Bank of Finland Institute for Economies in Transition (BOFIT).

Abstract

The overflow of information generated during disasters can be as paralyzing to humanitarian response as the lack of information. Making sense of this flash flood of information, "Big Data", is proving an impossible challenge for traditional humanitarian organizations; so they’re turning to Digital Humanitarians: tech-savvy volunteers who craft and leverage ingenious crowdsourcing solutions with trail-blazing insights from artificial intelligence. Digital Humanitarians take online collective action to the next level—particularly when spearheading relief efforts in countries ruled by dictatorships. This talk charts the rise of Digital Humanitarians and concludes with their collective action in repressive contexts.

Speaker Bio

Patrick Meier is the author of the book " Digital Humnitarians: How Big Data is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response." He directs QCRI's Social Innovation Program where he & his team use human and machine computing to develop "Next Generation Humanitarian Technologies" in partnership with international humanitarian organizations. Patrick was previously with Ushahidi and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. He has a PhD from The Fletcher School, Pre-Doc from Stanford and an MA from Columbia. His influential blog iRevolutions has received over 1.5 million hits. Patrick tweets at @patrickmeier.

The final class will pose nine questions, each question digging into
each of the nine topics covered over the quarter.  Pizza at 6pm!