#TechAtUrban
Machine Learning in a Data-Driven World:
What Does It Mean for Public Policy?
Speaker Biographies
Dan Chenok is the executive director of the IBM Center for the Business of Government. He
oversees all the center's activities for connecting research and practice to benefit government,
and has a special focus on technology, cybersecurity, regulation, budget, and acquisition issues.
Chenok previously led consulting services for Public Sector Technology Strategy, working with
IBM government, healthcare, and education clients. Before joining IBM, Chenok was a senior vice
president for civilian operations with Pragmatics, and before that was a vice president for
business solutions and offerings with SRA International. As a career government executive,
Chenok served as the branch chief for information policy and technology with the Office of
Management and Budget (OMB). He led a staff overseeing federal information and IT policy,
including electronic government, computer security, privacy, and IT budgeting. In 2008, he
served on Barack Obama’s transition team as the government lead for the Technology,
Innovation, and Government Reform group, and as a member of the OMB Agency Review Team.
Constantine E. Kontokosta is the deputy director for academics at the New York University
Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) and is an assistant professor of urban informatics
at CUSP and the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering. He is also the principal investigator and
head of the CUSP Quantified Community research facility, a groundbreaking project in
partnership with Hudson Yards, which will create a fully instrumented urban neighborhood in
New York City. As a member of the CUSP leadership team, Kontokosta plays a major role in
defining and implementing CUSP’s strategic priorities and serves as the academic director for its
graduate programs. Kontokosta‘s research incorporates urban planning, data science, and
systems engineering, and he has worked with city agencies to address urban sustainability and
resilience. He leads the CUSP Building Informatics and Computational Urban Policy research
area, focusing on urban energetics and data-driven climate change mitigation strategies for
cities. His research has been published in leading academic journals, and he has two forthcoming
books on civic analytics and on big data and urban sustainability. Kontokosta’s work has been
featured in CNN, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Fast Company, Bloomberg News,
Financial Times, and the American Society of Civil Engineers’s Civil Engineering magazine. He holds
a PhD from Columbia University.
URBAN INSTITUTE 2100 M STREET NW, WASHINGTON, DC 20037  URBAN.ORG
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Stephanie Shipp is the deputy director and a research professor at the Social and Decision
Analytics Laboratory (SDAL) at the Virginia Bioinformatics Laboratory at Virginia Tech. Shipp’s
work addresses topics related to the use of data to advance policy, the science of data, and
metropolitan analytics. She is leading and engaging in projects at the local, state, and federal level
to assess data quality and the use of new and traditional sources of data. Her research focuses on
developing statistical methodology and tools for using big data to model the social condition
quantitatively at scale. She previously served as the director of the Economic Assessment Office
in the Advanced Technology Program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Shipp also led economic and statistical programs at the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, and she began her career at the Federal Reserve Board. She is a fellow of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Statistical Association; she is
also an elected member of the International Statistics Institute.
Robert Santos, chief methodologist at the Urban Institute, has over 35 years of experience
designing research and evaluation studies. His expertise includes qualitative and quantitative
research design, sampling, survey operations, and statistical analysis. He specializes in
disadvantaged populations such as Hispanics, blacks, and undocumented immigrants. Santos is
also an expert in travel behavior research; he served as a statistical advisor on the 2009 National
Household Travel Survey and developed a driving exposure data-collection system for the AAA
Foundation for Traffic Safety. He has also conducted studies in education, health, racial and
ethnic topics, sensitive topic issues, special populations, environmental issues, housing issues,
politics, and firefighter safety. Before joining Urban, Santos held executive-level positions at the
Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan and NORC at the University of Chicago.
He was also a partner of NuStats, LLC in Austin, Texas. Santos has served on the Transportation
Research Board and numerous panels for the Committee on National Statistics at the National
Academies. He has also served on the editorial board of Public Opinion Quarterly and held various
executive positions in the Washington Statistical Society, the American Statistical Association
(ASA), and the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), where he served as
president in 2014. Santos is vice president of the ASA and is the 2006 recipient of the Founder’s
Award for excellence in survey statistics and contributions to the statistical community. He holds
an MA in statistics from the University of Michigan.
URBAN INSTITUTE 2100 M STREET NW, WASHINGTON, DC 20037  URBAN.ORG
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