Announcing the CARTO Scientific Committee

CARTO has been at the forefront of the development of Spatial Data Science, a subset of Data Science that focuses on the unique characteristics of spatial data, moving beyond simply looking at where things happen to understand why they happen there.

Our goal is to make the work of Spatial Data Scientists more productive and enjoyable, making it easier for Developers and Analysts to collaborate with them. To help us reach this goal, and for spatial analysis to continue to change our world as we know it, we are very pleased to announce the formation of the CARTO Scientific Committee. Areas of activity for the committee will include:

• Collaborations in R&D; joint scientific projects in Spatial Data Science
• Product feedback and roadmap validation
• Scientific workshops to discuss specific issues on Spatial Data Science and possible solutions
• Professional Mentoring between teams

Inaugural Members

	Bruno Sánchez-Andrade, PhD Principal Scientist at Microsoft "AI for Earth", building the "Planetary Computer". Bruno has led Big Data innovation at the World Bank Innovation Labs, served as VP Social Impact at the satellite company Satellogic and Chief Scientist at Mapbox. Bruno has published the book "Impact Science" on the role of science and research for social and environmental Impact. He was awarded Mirzayan Science Policy Fellow of the US National Academies of Science and a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum.
	Giulia Carella, PhD Giulia Carella is a researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. She holds a PhD in applied statistics in climate from the University of Southampton (UK), and previously worked as a Data Scientist at CARTO. Before joining CARTO she worked as a researcher at Le Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement LSCE, (France) and at the National Oceanography Centre (UK). She has an expertise in the development and application of statistics and machine learning methods for spatial and spatio-temporal problems, with applications ranging from climate science to spatial demography.
	Esteban Moro, PhD Esteban Moro is a researcher, data scientist and professor at MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) (visiting) and Universidad Carlos III (UC3M) in Spain (tenured). He was previously a researcher at the University of Oxford. He is an affiliate faculty at Joint Institute UC3M-Santander on Big Data at UC3M and the Joint Institute of Mathematical Sciences (Spain). He has published extensively throughout his career (more than 100 articles) and has led many projects funded by government agencies and/or private companies.
	Alexander Singleton, PhD Alex Singleton is Professor of Geographic Information Science at the University of Liverpool where he established the Geographic Data Science Lab. He is Deputy Director of the ESRC Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC) and Director of the ESRC Data Analytics & Society CDT. His research is concerned with how the complexities of individual behaviours, attitudes and contexts manifest spatially, and can be represented and understood through a framework of geographic data science.
	Julia Koschinsky, PhD Julia Koschinsky, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of the Center for Spatial Data Science at the University of Chicago. She is currently working on scientific reasoning and research design for exploratory spatial data analysis to increase the chance of discovering unexpected and explicable results in GeoDa and beyond.

We look forward to working with our Scientific Committee to advance the field of Spatial Data Science and will be sharing results of our joint scientific projects in future blog posts.