This lecture by Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones, co-authors of their 2023 book, will trace the dynamic relationships among data, truth, and power, exploring how data-empowered algorithms have come to shape our personal, professional, and political realities.

Chris Wiggins is an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University and the Chief Data Scientist at . At Columbia he is a founding member of the  executive committee of the Data Science Institute, and of the Department of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics as well as the Department of Systems Biology, and is affiliated faculty in Statistics. He is a co-founder and co-organizer of hackNY (http://hackNY.org), a nonprofit which since 2010 has organized once a semester student hackathons  and the hackNY Fellows Program, a structured summer internship at NYC startups. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and is a recipient of Columbia's Avanessians Diversity Award.

Matthew L. Jones is the Smith Family Professor of History at Princeton University. He is completing a book, on state surveillance of communications and information warfare. He has published two books previously, and (both with Chicago). The Mellon Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Science Foundation have funded his research and teaching.