Science in the Public Square: Seminar on Intelligence, Data, and Secrecy

Join guest speaker Matthew L. Jones, Princeton University's Smith Family Professor of History, for an afternoon seminar focusing on the history of big data, intelligence gathering, and the National Security Agency. This event will bring together scholars interested in the relations between science, technology, and society for a wide-ranging discussion of the future of data and intelligence.

Guest speaker bio: Matthew L. Jones focuses on the history of recent information technologies and intelligence as well as the history of science and technology in early modern Europe. He received his A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard (1994, 2000) and an M.Phil. from Cambridge, after which he taught at Columbia for twenty-three years. Along with Chris Wiggins, he is the author of How Data Happened, a history of the science, politics, and power of data, statistics, and machine learning from the 1800s to the present (W. W. Norton, 2023).

He has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, and is currently a CIFAR fellow in the Future Flourishing project.