Dr. Joseph Robertson is an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate of the Lake Traverse Reservation and is the Founder and Chief Data Scientist of Mato Ohitika Analytics LLC.

Mato Ohitika Analytics LLC provides tribal communities with statistical consulting, data science solutions and machine learning & artificial intelligence research and development. The company’s primary focus is on the role of data driven decision making in tribal governance using the Data Sovereignty Initiative (DSI).

The DSI is a native-centric horizontal governance framework designed to create SMART solutions to solve significant challenges facing Native nations by bridging science and culture through Indigenous Data Sovereignty. Dr. Robertson focused his doctoral work on developing an ethical, cultural, and Native community-based approach to tribal nation building that incorporates data science to support decision making in education, health care, economic development, resource management, and other areas of tribal governance.

Dr. Robertson holds a Ph.D in Computational Science and Statistics and a Master of Science in Statistics from South Dakota State University, and a B.S. in Mathematics from Colorado State University. Joseph is an educator and has spent a number of years working in the Indian education system teaching mathematics and statistics.

Jeff Jonas is an acclaimed data scientist. He is at the forefront of solving some of the world’s most complex business and big data problems for governments and companies. A former IBM fellow, Jonas is the leading creator of entity resolution systems. National Geographic recognized him as the Wizard of Big Data, and today numerous organizations rely on his systems to extract useful intelligence from tsunamis of data.

For more than three decades, Jonas has focused on creating technologies that solve the world’s biggest data challenges, while also being an advocate for privacy and civil liberties. He has tackled many high-profile challenges, including identifying potential terrorists, detecting fraudulent behavior in casinos, connecting loved ones after a natural disaster, and modernizing voter registration systems.

A three-time entrepreneur, Jonas sold his last company to IBM in 2005. With his latest company Senzing, he is first focused on democratizing entity resolution – making this complicated task for programmers easy.

Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in the Department of Information Studies where she serves as the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2). She also holds appointments in African American Studies and Gender Studies. She is a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford and has been appointed as a Commissioner on the Oxford Commission on AI & Good Governance (OxCAIGG). She is a board member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, serving those vulnerable to online harassment. and serves on the NYU Center Critical Race and Digital Studies advisory board. She is the author of a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press), which has been widely-reviewed in scholarly and popular publications.