Alex 'Sandy' Pentland has helped create and direct MIT’s Media Lab, the Media Lab Asia, and the Center for Future Health. He chairs the World Economic Forum’s Data Driven Development council, is Academic Director of the Data-Pop Alliance, and is a member of the Advisory Boards for Google, Nissan, Telefonica, the United Nations Secretary General, Monument Capital, and the Minerva Schools. In 2012 Forbes named Sandy one of the “seven most powerful data scientists in the world,” and in 2013 he won the McKinsey Award from Harvard Business Review.

Hyejin Youn is an assistant professor at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). She was a research fellow at Santa Fe Institute and Harvard Kennedy School, and visiting scientist at MIT Media Lab. Her research aims to develop a mathematical and computational framework to understand complex systems including Science of Cities, Pathway of Innovation, and Linguistics (Semantic shift).

Josh Bongard is Professor at the University of Vermont and head of the Morphology, Evolution & Cognition Laboratory. His research centers on how cognition is incorporated in evolutionary robotics, evolutionary computation and physical simulation. He is the author of How the Body Shapes the Way We Think. He was named one of MIT Technology Review's top 35 young innovators under 35 and awarded a prestigious Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship and a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) by Barack Obama at the White House.

Elena N. Naumova is Professor and Chair of the Division of Nutrition Data Science at the Friedman School of Tufts University and NECSI co-faculty. Her research includes development and applications of a broad range of analytic tools for spatio-temporal data analysis applied to emergent disease surveillance, exposure assessment, environmental epidemiology, molecular biology, nutrition, and growth.

Blake LeBaron is the Abram L. and Thelma Sachar Chair of International Economics at the International Business School, Brandeis University. He was a Sloan Fellow, and is a recent recipient of the Market Technician’s Association Mike Epstein award. He recently spent two years as a visiting researcher with the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury Department. He currently directs the Masters of Science in Business Analytics program at Brandeis, and is part of a Brandeis interdisciplinary research and teaching group interested in modeling dynamics in a wide range of fields.