Technology. Meet Sociology. Designing Data Systems that Benefit Both Worlds

Dawn Nafus is an anthropologist and senior research scientist at Intel Labs, where she leads research that enables Intel to make socially-informed decisions about its products. She is an expert on health and environmental sensing, how data and measurement has changed societies, and digital research methods. She is the editor of Quantified: Biosensing Technologies in Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2016), co-author of Self-Tracking (MIT Press 2016) and co-editor of Ethnography for a Data-Saturated World (Manchester University Press, 2018). The New York Review of Books has called Self-Tracking “easily the best book I’ve come across on the subject” while Science Magazine notes it “develop[s] a nuanced position that acknowledges both the opportunities and the challenges raised by self-tracking.” She speaks on these topics at a wide variety of technology, policy, and academic venues, including SXSW, the OECD, and the National Academy of Sciences. She recently served as Program Co-Chair for the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC) 2018. She holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge.

Henry is a senior principal engineer in the Intel Software and Services Group, Developer Products Division, and is the editor of The Parallel Universe, Intel’s quarterly magazine for software innovation. He first joined Intel in 2000 to help drive parallel computing inside and outside the company. He transferred to Intel Labs in 2010 to become the program manager for various research programs in academia, including the Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining Intel, Henry was Director of Scientific Computing at the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center MSRC, a Department of Defense high-performance computing facility. Henry holds a B.S. in biochemistry from Louisiana State University, an M.S. in medical informatics from the Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine, and a PhD in molecular genetics from the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine. He has published extensively in computational life science and high-performance computing. Henry recently rejoined Intel after spending four years working on a second PhD in information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he established an expertise in applied informatics and machine learning for problems in healthcare and chemical exposure.