Emmanuel Letouzé

Focus Areas: Human Development, Development Economics, Political Development, Official Statistics, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Violence

Dr. 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”. Prior he worked as an Economist for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in New York (2006-09), and for the French government as a Technical Assistant in official statistics and public finance with Vietnam’s General Statistics Office and Ministry of Finance in Hanoi, Vietnam (2000-04). 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 is a regular author and speaker on data, technology, Big Data and AI for development and democracy, especially as related to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), official statistics, crime, conflict, gang violence, gender- based violence, inequality, livelihoods, poverty and migration, notably. He has given talks and lectures at MIT, Harvard, Columbia, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, UPF the United Nations, Eurostat, The World Bank, The World Economic Forum, UNESCO, UNESCWA, UNESCAP, among others. Starting in the Fall of 2023, he will be a Visiting Professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, teaching a course on “Gender Data for Gender Equality”. In 2022 he was the lead author of a chapter on “AI for the SDGs—and Beyond? Towards a Human AI Culture for Development and Democracy” in a collective book on “Missing Links in AI Governance” published by

UNESCO and MILA (Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithms) along with co-contributors Yoshua Bengio, Andrew Ng, Kate Crawford and Erik Brynjolfsson.

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 Affaires-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.

Education

• PhD in Demography, University of California Berkeley
• MA in International Affairs, Columbia University
• MA in Applied Economics-Economic Demography, Sciences Po Paris
• BA in Political Science and Economics, Sciences Po Paris

Awards & Honors

• 2022 Amazon Research Award Recipient 2021, University Pompeu Fabra, Spain
• 2021 – 2023 Marie Skłodowska Curie individual fellowship, University Pompeu Fabra, Spain
• 2013– 2014 University of California Dean’s Normative Time Fellowship, UC Berkeley, USA
• 2010 – 2013 University of California Regents' Intern Doctoral Fellowship, UC Berkeley, USA
• 2004 – 2005 J. William Fulbright Fellowship for MA at Columbia University