Our guest today is a perfect example of the kind of combination of humanities and science in a single person. Linda Holliday is the founder and CEO of Citia. Linda grew up in a family of engineers but decided to go her own way and pursue design in college. She was able to use her home-brewed love of engineering and math together with her sense of design to start two companies, build a very unique understanding of the intersection of data, engineering, and the human.

Our guest today, Scott Vlaminck, cofounded SmartThings with 6 other guys in the spring of 2012. Their goal was to make your world - your house - smarter. In the fall of 2012 they raised 1.2 million dollars in one of the biggest campaigns on Kickstarter. Only two years later in 2014 they were acquired by Samsung for $200 million dollars. Now their IOT devices are in your inner sanctum - your home - and they work hard to earn your trust.

In October, Ben was a guest on Ned Bellavance’s podcast - Anexipod. We talked about one of Ben's favorite subjects - how data is essential to driving better customer experiences.

Who knew that the food and beverage industry was ripe for disruption using the power of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data? Well, Jason Cohen did. Jason Cohen is the Founder and CEO of Analytical Flavor Systems - a startup focused on bringing the power of A.I. and machine learning to the world of flavors and sensory science. Jason started his company after studying sensory science and computer science at Penn State, as well as founding The Tea Institute, a research group devoted to tea. He is even a professional coffee, tea, and beer taster. So, he knows his stuff!

Our guest today, Karthik Krishnamurthy, is the Senior Vice-President of Cognizant Digital Business - AI & Analytics, Interactive and Intelligent Products. In his two-decade career at Cognizant, he has worked across many strategic areas. One of his focus areas today is analytical storytelling and the human connection, where he has collaborated with Christian Madsbjerg, a guest in a previous episode. In the end, it's all about bringing the human to data.

Our guest is at the intersection of innovation and creation at one of the most important technology companies in the world. Yoon Lee is the Senior Vice President and Division Head, Content and Services, Product Innovation at Samsung Electronics America. In today’s world, our lives are connected to our devices in a way inconceivable even a few decades ago. Yoon is in a unique position to understand how A.I. and an understanding of the human context can make for better experiences for users.

Our guest today has been on a long crusade to raise awareness about how our digital tools are continuing and exacerbating the problems we already have around poverty and inequality. Virginia Eubanks is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is the author of the book “Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor”.

Our guest was there in one of the seminal elections in the last decade, working on the 2012 Obama campaign in the legendary “cave” doing political data science. David Shor is now the Head of Political Data Science at Civis Analytics. Civis Analytics was founded in the afterglow of Obama’s win with the backing of Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google. These Obama campaign alums were building on the successes in polling and data science used so successfully in that campaign.

You could be forgiven for thinking that curiosity gets pretty short shrift in our culture today. Our guest on this episode, Sarah Davanzo - VP of Consumer and Market Insights and Foresights at L’Oreal is also referred to as the Chief Curiosity Officer. She takes exploration and curiosity extremely seriously and has applied data science and analytics to the field in an unprecedented way. On top of that, she is an extremely interesting person to talk to.

Our guest on this episode started a company with one of the best names ever! Terry Young, the founder and CEO of Sparks and Honey, has created a very different way of approaching cultural trends. Sparks and Honey’s active learning system, Q, brings top-grade data science and machine learning to the art of trend spotting and understanding how our culture is changing. I sat down with Terry at his Madison Ave headquarters in New York City.