Emmanuel Letouzé is the Director and co-Founder of Data-Pop Alliance, an international NGO created in 2013 with the MIT Media Lab and the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) that focuses on the applications and implications of data, statistics, technology and AI for human development, humanitarian action, and democracy, with a strong focus on the Global South.
He was a Marie Curie Fellow at the University Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona from Feb 2021 to May 2023, working on Big Data and AI for crime and violence in Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa. He is a Visiting Researcher at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, a Founding Fellow of MIT Connection Science, an Associate Scientist at ELLIS (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems) Alicante Unit, and a co-founder of the Open Algorithms (OPAL) initiative, that aims to allow the ethical and safe analysis of sensitive data such telecom data.
He was Senior Development Economist in UN Global Pulse’s Unit in the Executive-Office of the UN Secretary General in 2011-12, where he wrote the White Paper on “Big Data for Development”. He also served on the Program Committees of the 1st and 2nd UN World Data Forums, as an appointed member of the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group that produced a Report on “Empowering society by reusing privately-held data for official statistics” (2021-22), and is a Founding member of the Technical Advisory Group of the Global Partnership on Sustainable Development Data (GPSDD).
He holds a BA in Political Science (1997) and an MA in Applied Economics-Economic Demography (2000) from Sciences Po Paris, an MA in International Affairs-Economic Development (2006) from Columbia University, where he was a Fulbright Scholar, and a PhD (2016) from UC Berkeley, where his dissertation focused on cell-phone data analysis for demo-economic research, followed by a post-doc (2016-17) at MIT Media Lab in Prof. Alex Pentland’s Human Dynamics Lab.