Presentation: Building Data Products for Social Good @Facebook

I am a scientist with a background in complex systems on Facebook’s spatial computing team. I work on the High-Resolution Settlement Layer and connectivity crisis data. I also work on spatial demographic questions. For my PhD I studied the evolution of dispersal strategies at the University of Wuerzburg, Germany. I expanded the work on spatial co-evolutionary systems as a postdoc at the New England Complex Systems Institute, where I also worked on spatial socio-economic systems, like ethnic violence. I received my diploma (equivalent to MS) in applied systems analysis at the Institute of Applied Systems Analysis in Osnabrueck, Germany.

Shankar Iyer is a research scientist on Facebook’s computational social science team. He is currently working on the company’s Disaster Mapping efforts, where Facebook data is aggregated to provide humanitarian organizations with a high-level view of how populations are affected by natural disasters. He has also worked on problems related to the social science of charitable giving and to efforts t omeasure the sense of community that people feel while using Facebook’s products. Prior to joining Facebook, Shankar was on the data science team at Quora. He also holds a Ph.D. in theoretical condensed matter physics from Caltech.