The Data Revolution is Here

Can open data help reduce energy consumption and thus slow down climate change? Can open data help farmers and crop insurers make better crop predictions? Can open data check the spread of disease? Can the private sector create development impact with open data? Read the blog and join us to talk data sciences for development with experts from The Climate Corporation, The GovLab, and Metabiota.

Ines Kapphan
Product Manager
The Climate Corporation

Ines Kapphan is a Product Manager at The Climate Corporation, a San Francisco-based company that provides software and insurance products to growers in order to help them protect against the adverse impact of bad weather. Ines oversees the company’s Total Weather Insurance product, an index-based weather insurance solution that pays out based on observed weather conditions. Ines is responsible for designing and underwriting the company’s parametric insurance products that help protect farmers’ revenues.

Prior to joining The Climate Corporation, Ines worked as a research associate for NCCR Climate, Switzerland, a research center for climate change modeling, risk assessment and insurance, and was a visiting researcher at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Her research is about the design of parametric weather insurance for agriculture to manage weather-induced output volatility and micro-weather insurances schemes in developing countries supporting the adaption of smallholder farmers to climate change.

Joel Gurin
Senior Advisor,
The GovLab@NYU

Joel Gurin is senior advisor at The GovLab@NYU, which studies and promotes open government and open data; Joel directs the The GovLab’s Open Data 500 project to study 500 U.S.-based companies that use open data as a key business resource. He leads a team that is now preparing to replicate the study in the UK, working with the Open Data Institute, and is in discussions with organizations interested in doing similar studies in more than a dozen different countries.

Joel’s new book, Open Data Now,is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of the uses of Open Data from government and other sources.

Ash Casselman
Product Manager,
Metabiota

Ash Casselman is a Product Manager at Metabiota in San Francisco, where she leads strategy and supports the productization of the company’s infectious disease research services. Metabiota develops systems to mitigate microbial threats, specializing in disease and pathogen detection, evaluation and response through the integration of field and lab research with health data analytics.

Recently, Ash developed Metabiota’s Outbreak Risk Bulletin Report, a risk management tool to help businesses translate outbreak information into informed decisions. Before joining Metabiota, Ash authored industry reports at the World Economic Forum.