Welcome to my website!
Recognition
Apolitical Government AI 100, 2025 and 2026
Named one of the world's 100 most influential individuals working on artificial intelligence in government and public policy, for two consecutive years.
ACL 2025 Outstanding Paper Award
Awarded to "HateDay: Insights from a Global Hate Speech Dataset Representative of a Day on Twitter" at the leading international conference in computational linguistics.
Oxford Saïd Business School, Best Published Paper Award
Awarded for the Science publication on quantifying reputation and success in art.
Institutional Leadership
Google.org Generative AI Accelerator
Selected as part of the inaugural cohort of Google.org's $20M Generative AI Accelerator, supporting organizations developing high-impact AI applications for global challenges.
AI system that translates the World Bank's evidence base, over 7,000 development impact evaluations, into actionable insights for policymakers.
World Bank AI Lab, Founder and Lead
Founded and lead the AI Lab in the Development Impact group at the World Bank, building AI systems used by governments and international institutions worldwide.
Selected Publications
HateDay: Insights from a Global Hate Speech Dataset Representative of a Day on Twitter
First global hate-speech dataset representative of a single day on Twitter, covering eight languages and four English-speaking countries.
NaijaHate: Evaluating Hate Speech Detection on Nigerian Twitter
First dataset annotated for hate-speech detection on a representative sample of Nigerian tweets, demonstrating that models trained on US data substantially overestimate real-world performance.
EconBERTa: Towards Robust Extraction of Named Entities in Economics
Released EconBERTa, a domain-specific language model pretrained on 1.5 million economic research articles, and EconIE, a new annotated dataset for named-entity recognition in economics.
Long ties, disruptive life events, and economic prosperity
Showed that long-distance social ties play a causal role in economic mobility, using population-scale Facebook network data.
Predicting food crises using news streams
An AI methodology that anticipates food crisis outbreaks up to 12 months in advance by analyzing 11 million news articles. Now operationally deployed across food-insecure countries.
Multilingual Detection of Personal Employment Status on Twitter
Active-learning methodology for identifying disclosures of employment status on social media in three languages, with applications to job matching, social protection, and labor-market measurement.
Mobile phone data for informing public health actions across the COVID-19 pandemic life cycle
Multi-author position paper on the use of mobile phone data for evidence-based pandemic response. Widely cited in pandemic-response literature.
Identifying Predictive Causal Factors from News Streams
Predictive Causal Graph framework for uncovering latent relationships between news events and real-world phenomena.
Quantifying reputation and success in art
Mapped the career trajectories of half a million artists through the global network of galleries and museums. Featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and Newsweek.
Press Coverage
Nature, "Can AI help beat poverty?"
Feature on how artificial intelligence is being used to test new approaches for aiding the world's poorest people, including the World Bank's AI work.
Axios, "AI Can Now Forecast the Next Food Crisis"
Coverage of the Science Advances paper on predicting food crises from news streams.
The Economist, "To Get to the Top of the Art World, Start There in the First Place"
Coverage of the methodology behind quantifying reputation and success in creative fields.
The Wall Street Journal, "The Surprising Formula for Becoming an Art Star"
Major coverage of the Science paper on quantifying success in art.
Newsweek, "How to Be a Successful Artist, According to Science"
Profile of the research on artistic careers and reputation networks.
Newsweek, "Facebook Thinks You're Gay or a Drug User Based on Three Likes"
Coverage of research on inferring personal attributes from minimal social media data.
The Washington Post, "The Real Promise of the Sharing Economy Is What It Could Do for the Poor"
Coverage of foundational research on peer-to-peer rental markets and the modern sharing economy.
Specialty and Research Coverage
CSIS, "AI and Global Food Security: A Focus on Early Warning Systems"
CSIS analysis of AI-powered early warning systems for global food security, contextualizing the work behind ZeroHungerAI.
VoxDev, "Reading Between the Lines"
In-depth research feature on the Science Advances paper and the ZeroHungerAI early-warning system.
MIT Sloan, "Why Big Changes Early in Life Can Help Later"
Institutional research feature on the PNAS paper, "Long ties, disruptive life events, and economic prosperity."
NYU News, "News You Can Use to Better Predict Food Crisis Outbreaks"
Institutional coverage from New York University on the food-crisis prediction research.
Marginal Revolution, "Better Predicting Food Crises"
Featured on the influential economics and public-policy blog of Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok.
Futurity, "Machine Learning Can Predict Food Crises"
Research-news coverage of the food-crisis prediction methodology.
Marginal Revolution, "Surprising Formula for Becoming an Art Star"
Coverage of the Science paper on the influential economics blog.
Artnet, "The Secret to Making It as an Artist"
Art-world coverage of the Science paper, with focus on early-career trajectories.
Phys.org, "Success in Prestigious Galleries Is Key to Lifelong Artistic Success"
Science-news coverage of the Science paper.
Talks and Public Engagement
UNICEF, Global Impact Evaluation Forum
Invited speaker at UNICEF's Global Impact Evaluation Forum on AI and program evaluation methodologies.
Google.org, AI for Social Good
Featured speaker at Google's flagship AI for Social Good webinar, presenting on AI deployment in international institutions.
Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Workshop on Food and Humanitarian Crises
Invited workshop at the Vatican presenting research on AI applications for food crises, one of the world's most prestigious interdisciplinary scientific bodies.
CBC Documentary, "The Science of Success"
Featured alongside other researchers in CBC's documentary exploring how reputation and success propagate through networks.
TEDx Talk, "Can We Predict Artistic Success?"
Public talk on data-driven approaches to understanding human achievement and creative success.
Editorial and Scholarly Service
Area Editor, ACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies
Editorial board membership at the ACM journal on computing for sustainable societies.