Jake Porway uses big data 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, which often don’t have the know-how or resources to benefit from data analysis. A former New York Times Data Scientist, Porway was named a 2012 National Geographic Emerging Explorer, and he currently hosts The Numbers Game on the National Geographic channel. He’s both a scientist and a coder, equally excited to pioneer the next machine learning algorithm as he is to optimize the code to run it. He hopes to make machines smarter, and he looks for new ways to help machines make sense of things for the greater good.
We’re living in revolutionary times. Nearly every interaction that occurs between our world and each other now occurs with a digital interface like a laptop, a cellphone or a FitBit. This digitization represents a paradigm shift in the way we’re instrumenting our world and the new bottom-up, democratized manner in
