Lada Adamic

Lada Adamic leads the Product Science group within Facebook's Data Science Team. She is also an adjunct associate professor at the University of Michigan's School of Information and Center for the Study of Complex Systems. Her research interests center on information dynamics in networks: how information diffuses, how it can be found, and how it influences the evolution of a network's structure. Her projects have included identifying expertise in online question and answer forums, studying the dynamics of viral marketing, and characterizing the structural and communication patterns in online social media. She has received an NSF CAREER award, a University of Michigan Henry Russell award, the 2012 Lagrange Prize in Complex Systems.

Chris Wiggins

Chris Wiggins is an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University and the Chief Data Scientist at The New York Times. At Columbia he is a founding member of the Department of Systems Biology, the executive committee of the Data Science Institute (http://datascience.columbia.edu/), and the Institute's education and entrepreneurship committees. He is also an affiliate of Columbia's Department of Statistics and a founding member of Columbia's Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (C2B2). He is a co-founder and co-organizer of hackNY (http://hackNY.org), a nonprofit which since 2010 has organized once a semester student hackathons and the hackNY Fellows Program, a structured summer internship at NYC startups.

Prior to joining the faculty at Columbia he was a Courant Instructor at NYU (1998-2001) and earned his PhD at Princeton University (1993-1998) in theoretical physics. In 2014 he was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and is a recipient of Columbia's Avanessians Diversity Award.