Hernán Muñoz

Hernán Muñoz is an economist and Professor at the University of Buenos Aires. He is also the National Director of Statistical Planning and Coordination in the National Institute of Statistics and Census of Argentina (INDEC).

INDEC is member of the High-Level Group for Partnership, Coordination and Capacity-Building for statistics for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (SDGs).

Niels Ploug

Niels Ploug is an economist and the Director of Social Statistics at Statistics Denmark since 2008. He is engaged nationally, at the European and the Global level in the work on SDG statistical indicators with a focus on the use of admin data and data disaggregation. He is responsible for the work on SDGs at Statistics Denmark and a Member of the UNECE Task Force on the SDGs. He is also the chairman of the UN GWG on Big Data. Before joining Statistics Denmark, he worked as the Research Director at The Danish National Institute of Social Research. Mr. Ploug is an Associate Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Economics.

Ayush Ariunzaya

Ayush Ariunzaya is the chairwoman of the National Statistical Office (NSO) in Mongolia. She has an M.A. from Leibniz University in Germany, attended the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and also earned a degree in Public Governance from the National Academy of Governance of Mongolia. Ms. Ariunzaya previously worked as the Chief Manager at Mongol Daatgal and as the Head of the Strategic Planning Department and Economic Policy Department of the Mongolian People’s Party (MPP).

Irena Križman

Irena Križman is the Vice President of the ISI. Before retirement in 2013 (from 2003-2013) she was the Director-General of the Statistical Office of the Republic Slovenia (SURS). Under her leadership of SURS, Slovenia has developed a modern statistical system based on secondary sources and harmonised with the EU, Euro Area and OECD requirements. In 2011 SURS conducted the first completely register based population census. She has been very active internationally and is one of the founders of High-level Group on Modernisation in Statistics. Ms. Križman holds an M.S. in Management of non-profit organizations and B. Sc. in Sociology from University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Johannes Jütting

Johannes Jütting is Manager of the Partnership in Statistics for Development in the 21st Century (PARIS21). He leads the partnership’s work in strengthening national statistical systems, promoting the integration of statistics and reliable data in the decision-making process and advocating for countries as crucial actors in the global development agenda. Mr Jütting holds a Ph.D. in Development and Agriculture Economics from Humboldt-University and regularly publishes about issues relating to data, statistics, development and the SDGs in the Huffington Post.

Attila Hancioglu

Attila Hancioglu is the Chief of the Data Collection Unit, Data and Analytics Section, at UNICEF headquarter in New York. As the Global Coordinator of the UNICEF-supported Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) programme since 2004, he has coordinated and provided technical support to the implementation of more than 150 MICS surveys, including the organization/facilitation of close to 50 regional MICS workshops. Under his leadership, the MICS programme evolved into a full-blown technical support system, a platform for the development of new measurement tools for use in household surveys, and initiated key partnerships with other survey programmes – including the establishment of the DHS-MICS-LSMS Collaborative Group. As Acting Chief since early 2015, Mr. Hancioglu has led the Data and Analytics Section to expand into new thematic and methodological work to align with the new development and monitoring agenda, and has been representing UNICEF at interagency platforms for the development of global SDG indicators, and as a chief statistician in various UN-led initiatives. Mr. Hancioglu is a member of the core team responsible for the development of a Data for Children Strategy for UNICEF. His areas of expertise include survey methodology, data disaggregation, analysis of child mortality, measurement of child poverty and assessment of data quality.

Rein Ahas

Rein Ahas is a Professor of Human Geography at the University of Tartu, Estonia. He is a member of Eurostat Task Force a Task Force on ‘Big Data and Official Statistics’ and the editorial boards of the Journal of Location Based Services (Taylor & Francis) and Travel Behavior and Society (Elsevier). Research interests of professor Ahas include the study of spatial mobility and tourism, seasonality and climate change impacts. He has been actively involved in the development of mobile positioning based research methodology for mobility studies and tourism geography. Mr. Ahas was one of the authors of Eurostat (2014) Feasibility Study on the Use of Mobile Positioning Data for Tourism Statistics.

Nuria Oliver

Nuria Oliver is a computer scientist with a PhD from MIT on perceptual intelligence. She has over 20 years of research experience, first at MIT, then at Microsoft Research and finally as the first female Scientific Director at Telefonica R&D (Spain). Her work on computational human behavior modeling, human-computer interaction, mobile computing and Big Data analysis, particularly applied for Social Good, is internationally known with over 100 scientific articles in international conferences and journals with several best paper awards and nominations. She is co-inventor of 40 filed patents. Ms. Oliver is the first Spanish female computer scientist named a Distinguished Scientist by the ACM and a Fellow of the European Association of Artificial Intelligence. Her work has received many awards, such as the MIT TR100 (today TR35) Young Innovator Award (2004), and the Gaudí Gresol award to Excellence in Science and Technology (2016).

Ola Rosling

Ola Rosling is President and Co-Founder of Gapminder Foundation, which he founded together with his wife and his father. Since 1999 Mr. Rosling has lead the development of the Trendalyzer software, which was acquired by Google in 2007. At Google he and his team delivered the Motion Chart as part of Google Spreadsheets. As Product Manager for Google Public Data, he then helped democratized access to Public Statistics by developing the infrastructure needed to make official statistics part of Google Search results. Mr. Rosling and his wife Anna Rosling returned to Gapminder in 2011 to develop free teaching materials for a fact-based worldview. In 2014 he coined the term “Factfulness”, which Gapminder is now promoting in order to make the education about Sustainable Development that is less ideological and more fact-based.

Charles Leyeka Lufumpa

Charles Leyeka Lufumpa is the Director of the Statistics Department of the African Development Bank (AfDB) Group. He is in charge of overall statistical functions of the Bank, including overseeing AfDB’s statistical capacity building activities that span across all African countries, sub-regional organizations and statistical training centers in Africa. He has over 30 years of professional work experience in statistics, poverty, infrastructure, agriculture and environmental issues in Africa. Under his leadership, the AfDB has emerged as one of the leading international institutions for promoting statistical development across Africa.

Haishan Fu

Haishan Fu is the Director of the World Bank’s Development Data Group, overseeing its global development monitoring and open data initiative, surveys and other technical advisory services, and global statistical programs such as the International Comparison Program. In her capacity as the Ex-Officio member of the WBG Data Council and the Co-Chair of the Development Data Directors Group, Ms. Fu leads and coordinates the development and implementation of the Bank’s development data agenda. She has been an active leader in the global statistical community, having served or currently serving as a member of the UN Secretary General’s Independent Expert Advisory Group on Data Revolution for Sustainable Development, Council Member of the International Statistical Institute, and Co-Chair of the Global Steering Committee of the Global Strategy to Improve Agricultural and Rural Statistics, among others. Ms. Fu holds a Ph.D. in Demography from Princeton University and a B.A. in Economics from Peking University.

Minh-Thu Pham

Minh-Thu Pham is Executive Director for Policy at the United Nations Foundation, where she develops and leads strategic initiatives to strengthen the UN’s ability to solve global problems and brings together governments, civil society and thought leaders to help reach global agreements. Over the last four years, she has led UNF’s effort to support the creation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). She recently taught international policymaking at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School and has over 15 years of experience in foreign policy, international diplomacy, and fieldwork.

Ms. Pham served in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General for Kofi Annan and Ban Ki-moon as policy adviser in the Strategic Planning Unit, leading initiatives to strengthen the UN and improve relations between the U.S. and the UN. Ms. Pham has high-level experience delivering the MDGs, implementing the peace accord in Bosnia and advancing refugee and humanitarian causes in Ethiopia, Vietnam and Washington, DC. She has a background in documentary work and was once a crew photographer for the BBC series Planet Earth. Ms. Pham holds an MPA from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and a BA in History from Duke University. She was born in Vietnam and lives in New York City.

Robert Chen

Dr. Robert S. Chen is director of CIESIN, the Center for International Earth Science Information Network, part of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York and an Anchor Partner in the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data. He manages the NASA Socioeconomic Data and Applications Center (SEDAC) and is a co-chair of the Thematic Network on Sustainable Development Data of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) and the Data Sharing Working Group of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO). Dr. Chen served on the UN Secretary-General’s Independent Expert Advisory Group on the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development in 2014 and is now a Strategic Advisor to the Data for Climate Action Challenge.

Sanjay Kumar

Sanjay Kumar is a social entrepreneur and Chief Executive at Geospatial Media and Communications. He has been working towards facilitating and accelerating growth of the geospatial industry worldwide and raising awareness of the industry’s value proposition and contribution to world’s economy and society. Having Co-Founded Geospatial Media and Communications, Mr. Kumar has been responsible for its transformation and evolution to be a leading geospatial media organisation making difference through geospatial knowledge and advocacy.

He also Co-Founded Association of Geospatial Industries (AGI) of India in 2008 and currently holds the position of President of AGI and serves on Board of Directors of Open Geospatial Consortium since 2011. Mr. Kumar is this year’s Chair for the UN-GGIM Private Sector Network. He holds a Masters in Political Science and M. Phil. in International Studies from the University of Delhi.

Judith Randel

Judith Randel is the Co-Founder of Development Initiatives, an independent organisation set up to use data and information to end poverty. All her work is done together with DI Co-Founder, Tony German and includes the Reality of Aid reports from 1992 – 2000, the Global Humanitarian Assistance Reports from 2000 to date, Investments to End Poverty 2013 and the data used to monitor G8 commitments. She is currently working on the P20 Initiative: data to leave no one behind, focused on data on progress for the people in the poorest 20% of the global population. DI has a major programme of work on transparency and access to information, including the establishment of the International Aid Transparency Initiative. Currently DI is working on a number of data initiatives at local, national and global levels. These include work on interoperability, data standards, joined up data and tracking the SDGs at local level. Ms. Randel has a distinguished Masters from the University of Bath and is on the Council for the Institute of Development Studies; she was part of the Chronic Poverty Research Centre for ten years, served on the Africa Partnership Initiative, DAC Expert Panel on the future of ODA, the Global Nutrition Report .

Philipp Schönrock

Philipp Schönrock is the Director of CEPEI, an independent, non-profit, data driven think tank, working through field based analysis and high-level advocacy to scale up the participation of Latin America and the Caribbean within the global development agendas. For two years he was Co-Chairman of the Beyond 2015 campaign, a civil society global initiative for the negotiation of the 2030 Agenda. Currently, he is a member of the GPSDD and Together 2030 Boards. Mr. Schönrock represents CEPEI as a member of the Colombian Confederation of NGOs Board.

Emmanuel Letouzé

Emmanuel Letouzé is the Director of the Data-Pop Alliance, a coalition on Big Data and Development created by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, MIT Media Lab (where he is a visiting scholar) and the Overseas Development Institute, joined by the Flowminder Foundation. He wrote the UN Global Pulse’s White Paper “Big Data for Development” in 2011 and his work since then has focused on Big Data’s application and implications for official statistics, poverty, conflict, climate change, ethics, and politics. He worked as an Economist for UNDP in New York from 2006-09 and from 2000-04 in Vietnam for the French Ministry of Finance on official statistics. He holds a BA and an MA from Sciences Po Paris, an MA from Columbia University, where he was a Fulbright Fellow, and a PhD in Demography from UC Berkeley. He is also a political cartoonist as ‘Manu’.