Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with Jake Porway and Nikki Roda about Data Without Borders.

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UPDATE: After this interview was finished Data Without Borders finished changing their name to DataKind.

Jake Porway is a machine learning and technology enthusiast who loves nothing more than seeing good values in data. He is the founder and executive director of DataKind, an organization that brings together leading data scientists with high impact social organizations to better collect, analyze, and visualize data in the service of humanity.

Jake was most recently the data scientist in the New York Times R&D lab and remains an active member of the data science community, bringing his technical experience from his past work with groups like NASA, DARPA, Google, and Bell Labs to bear on the social sector. Jake's work has been featured in leading academic journals and conferences (PAMI, ICCV), the Guardian, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, and he has been honored as a 2011 PopTech Social Innovation Fellow and a 2012 National Geographic Emerging Explorer. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Statistics from UCLA.

Nikki Roda is a Master's student at the University of Michigan's School of Information where she is studying Human-Computer Interaction and Information Analysis and Retrieval. She's interested in helping non-profits use their information more effectively. Nikki hosted a Data Without Borders inspired datadive at the University of Michigan this spring and is planning to host another in February 2013. If you're interested in getting involved or just learning more feel free to contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Brock Palen and Jeff Squyres speak with Aron Ahmadia and Matt Turk about mpi4py a set of MPI bindings for Python.

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Aron works at the intersection of applied mathematics, software engineering, and application domains as diverse as adaptive optics, semiconductor lithography, and ice-sheet modeling. He focuses on the collaborative development of robust, reproducible, and scalable software tools for computational science. He is also a moderator of SciComp Stack Exchange.

Matthew Turk is an NSF OCI Postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, working on simulations of the first stars and galaxies in the universe. He received his PhD from Stanford University and worked at UCSD at a postdoc, and is interested in the high-redshift universe, high performance computing, community building for scientific software,and the development of infrastructure for next-generation simulations, data analysis and visualization. His primary technical projects are yt ( http://yt-project.org/ ) and Enzo (http://enzo-project.org/ ) and he can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/matthewturk/ .