America
Indian-American DJ Patil named as first US chief data scientist
Washington, Feb 20
The White House has named
Dhanurjay 'DJ' Patil as its first chief data scientist to help shape
policies and practices to help the US remain a leader in technology and
innovation.
In a memo to the American people Thursday, Patil, 45,
noted that "the Obama administration has embraced the use of data to
improve the operation of the US government and the interactions that
people have with it."
Patil said his role "will be to responsibly
source, process, and leverage data in a timely fashion to enable
transparency, provide security, and foster innovation for the benefit of
the American public, in order to maximize the nation's return on its
investment in data.
Patil said he planned to focus on four activities: Providing vision on how to provide maximum social return on federal data;
Creating
nationwide data policies that enable shared services and
forward-leaning practices to advance our nation's leadership in the data
age;
Working with agencies to establish best practices for data management and ensure long-term sustainability of databases;
Recruiting
and retaining the best minds in data science for public service to
address these data science objectives and act as conduits among the
government, academia, and industry.
President Barack Obama "has
prioritized bringing top technical talent like DJ into the federal
government to harness the power of technology and innovation to help
government better serve the American people," said chief technology
officer Megan Smith.
"DJ joins the White House following an
incredible career as a data scientist - a term he helped coin - in the
public and private sectors, and in academia," she said.
Most recently, Patil served as the Vice President of Product at RelateIQ, which was acquired by Salesforce.
He also previously held positions at LinkedIn, Greylock Partners, Skype, PayPal, and eBay.
Prior
to his work in the private sector, Patil worked at the Department of
Defence, where he directed new efforts to bridge computational and
social sciences in fields like social network analysis to help
anticipate emerging threats to the United States.
As a doctoral
student and faculty member at the University of Maryland, DJ used open
data sets published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration (NOAA) to make major improvements in numerical weather
forecasting.
He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the
University of California, San Diego, and a PhD in applied mathematics
from the University of Maryland College Park.
Patil has also
authored a number of influential articles and books explaining the
important current and potential applications of data science.
(Arun Kumar can be contacted at [email protected])