Chris Ninnes is a data scientist in Facebook's Cross Border Business team in London. He seeks out the challenges to growing a business internationally with Facebook, and turns these insights into product strategy. He started his career in consulting, helping businesses use data to improve their internal processes and controls, and is a named inventor of Deloitte's 'Spotlight' audit analytics platform.

If you think fashion and technology are at opposite poles and can never cross, you should meet Aimée O’Beirne, the Fashion Data Expert and Content Strategist at Zalando. With an established background in fashion design, fashion buying and trend forecasting, Aimée helps to strengthen the relationship between technology and fashion, working alongside research and software engineers. She is currently working to strategise the automation of content on the Zalando shop.

Daniel Rzasa is an experienced multimedia journalist working as a Teaching Fellow for Google News Lab. He travels around Central and Eastern Europe and teaches journalists how to enhance their reporting with online-based tools and shares best practices from all around the world. He holds an MA in financial journalism and has worked across a variety of newsrooms in the UK, Poland and Belgium

When it comes to Big Data, data analysis and engineering, Sergio feels like a fish in water. He is Research Engineer Lead at Zalando, Europe's largest fashion e-commerce company. With a Ph.D. in Data Mining and Machine Learning, Sergio is focused on understanding and improving customer experience capitalising on a wide variety of data sources utilising the latest technologies.

Digging deep into data, finding new insights and communicating results effectively -- Omayma rocks it all. She worked as a data scientist at a tech company and considers data as the voice of the users. Incorporating her engineering background, research skills and data science, she likes to create data products, and enable others to make data-informed decisions

Web services, big data architecture and machine learning solutions -- Leonid crunches these all! He is a ML cloud engineer at Google Cloud Professional Services Organization. With over 10 years of product engineering experience in leading Russian and German tech companies, Leonid’s focus is complicated backends for b2c products based on machine learning and distributed data processing.

If you’re interested in investigative journalism or conflict research, you’ve probably heard of Christiaan who is a conflict researcher at Bellingcat. He trains journalists from all over the globe how to verify open sources and use these for investigative reporting. Christiaan’s digital reconstruction of the Turkish coup d’état attempt won the Innovation Award of the European Press Prize. DataFest Tbilisi is proud to host him for the second time now.

If you have massive statistical, econometric or economic data to analyze, give it to Timothy and relax. He will nail it. Timothy is a Product Experience Analyst in Facebook's Cross Border Business team in London. He developed his jaw-dropping data analysis skills and product focus working as a data scientist in various Berlin-based start-ups and mobile app developers before recently relocating to London.

Alice is a Data Scientist at Zalando, Europe's largest fashion e-commerce company. The Oxford-graduate developes machine learning systems that provide a personalised shopping experience to 25 million customers. Having began her career researching fundamental physics, inferring the meaning behind vast data sets has always been core to her motivation. She has worked on a variety of data science solutions always with a keen focus on measurable business and customer impact.

How can technology and data help enable better journalism? If you want the answer, Mirko is the best person to ask. He is a senior expert for data-driven journalism and use of technology in newsrooms. He has founded a tool helping journalists worldwide to create charts and maps in minutes. Mirko is a member of the Deutsche Welle Research- and Cooperation team and a contributor to the "Data Journalism Handbook".

Isabella is an Assistant Professor in Statistics at University College Dublin. Having a broad experience in analyzing complex data, she works closely with scientists with different expertise to develop new statistical techniques. Isabella is active in organising international events to promote diversity in the Statistics, Data Science, Network Science, and R communities.

Jason grew up in Kansas, USA. Before moving to Tbilisi he sought the secrets of the universe through mathematics, lived in Ghana for two years, worked as a data scientist for The Man in Corporate America, and rode his bicycle a lot. Nowadays Jason works for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project mining big data and building open source tools to help journalists do battle with oligarchs, corrupt politicians, and other international characters of considerable nefariousness.

Rayna’s superpower is to find stories in piles of numbers and tell them with innovative tools from different perspectives. She is a multimedia journalist working for Deutsche Welle, ARD and Deutschlandfunk. Rayna impressed all at the last year’s edition of DataFest Tbilisi and absolutely delighted us by returning this year.

Doing journalism with data is a tough row to hoe everywhere in the world, but imagine how hard it can get in a region where even access to official information remains challenging. Pinar faces that on a daily basis. She is a co-founder of a number of data journalist news portals in Turkey, and more importantly, she teaches young journalists how to collect, filter, analyze, clean and visualize data to tell a story.

Were you impressed when world’s top physicists announced they had just discovered a new sub-atomic particle consistent with the long-sought Higgs boson back in 2012? Well, Erekle was member of the experiment team at CERN when that happened. He is a DevOps Architect and Data Analyst with a Ph.D. in application of Machine Learning methods for large scale computing infrastructures management and operations automation.

Denis is the person behind Ukraine's Open Data Reform. He heads SocialBoost NGO -- community of professional coders, civic activists and entrepreneurs, who join forces with gov’t and IT companies to create IT services that solve national challenges. It supports open data based startups and has a portfolio of 100+ alumni with over $800 thousands in investments. As an advisor to Ukraine's PM in 2015, Denis helped the ministries open their data and coordinated open data workshops for gov’t officials.

Iryna has been working with online media for 13 years and knows it backwards. Being a professional graphic designer and journalist, she supervised and directly participated in the development of more than 10 online resources: blogging platforms, web-pages, news portals, internal staff portals, online media, and online catalogues. She is Key Expert on New Digital Content of the EU-funded EaP Civil Society Facility project.

Vladimir is an IT and e-learning expert with over 20 years of experience in the field. He has been involved in development, launching, supporting and promoting of e-learning courses for various target audiences in the Eastern Partnership countries. He excels in theory and practice of software design and development, set-up of e-learning platforms at all stages. He is Key Expert on e-Learning of the EU-funded EaP Civil Society Facility project.

Vincenzo has spent the last decade working in data science, at the cross border of academia and industry. As the co-founder of Gnosis Data Analysis, an University of Crete spin-off, he has provided consulting for health care providers, research centers, and insurance companies. He has developed statistical methods for life science and bioinformatics, using data science for uncovering biological mechanisms at the molecular level. Currently Associate Professor at Ilia State University, he crunches data and enjoys doing data science.

Andriy is an experienced data visualization specialist, data journalist and open data consultant. His professional background includes heading infographics department at leading Ukrainian magazines as well as working as a data journalist for an online media outlet specializing in investigative data stories. He teaches data visualization a t the Ukrainian Catholic University.

Rinat is a person behind Kyrgyzstan’s leading investigative medium. His organisation, Kloop Media, has its own journalism school and raises new generations of investigative journalists. Rinat supervises projects that everyone considers insane. As soon as a project starts looking plausible, he passes it to somebody else. His projects included using drones for investigative reporting, cross-linking public databases to discover corruption, real-time broadcasts using aggregated bandwidth of cellular modems, AI-based assistant researcher for investigative reporters and building first Kyrgyz satellite.

Vadim makes magic with Tableau. He is an acclaimed visual journalist and designer who has been named among the best Tableau developers multiple times. Each of his visualizations lands hundreds of thousands of views in his country and around the world. Vadim has been working in the media for more than 20 years now. He not only creates fabulous infographics but also teaches others how to do the same.

Are you interested in topics such as humanity's relationship with technology, AI biases, and the wider impact of social media? Then Łukasz is the best person to listen to. With a background in technology and political science, he studies the ways in which we can bridge our technological and social realities. He is a researcher, lecturer and workshop facilitator.

Jo has over 10 years experience running projects across a wide range technology, arts and communications projects. He is a delivery manager at Open Knowledge International (OKI), a global non-profit organisation helping civil society groups access and use data to take action on social problems. Jo is currently the manager of the Frictionless Data initiative at OKI.

Varoon Bashyakarla is a data scientist, studying how personal data is becoming a political asset, influencing elections and referenda. He has worked for many global companies, including Dropbox, where he helped preempt cyberattacks and supported the launch of a new office. Varoon received his bachelor’s degree in statistics and economics from Yale University.

Pavel left his high-frequency trading career to professionally participate in data science competitions. In a year he became #15 in a global ranking of the leading platform called Kaggle. During his diverse professional experience, he has worked as a chief business development officer, financial consultant, researcher and teacher.

As a 13-year Amazon veteran and a PhD in Machine Learning, Denis worked on such exciting projects as Search Inside the Book, Amazon Mobile apps and Kindle Direct Publishing. Since moving to Amazon European headquarters in Luxembourg in 2013, Denis has become a Principal Solutions Architect at AWS EMEA, helping customers adopt AI and ML technologies.

Justin is a consulting strategist on Google’s media engagement and journalism development in Africa, including strategies for journalistic toolkits and digital journalism experiments, data journalism projects, and digital migration. He is Founding CEO at Code for Africa, the continent’s largest federation of civic technology and digital democracy organisations that empower citizens by giving actionable information along with new ways to amplify citizen voices.

Anton is an experienced software engineer and system analyst. He is a team lead and scrum master at Exactpro LLC. He leads development of Exactpro internal tools. He specializes in R&D and product development management, trading and testing software architecture, system performance analysis, agile development, software testing, test automation, Java, C++, .Net.

Alexander fights corruption by revealing corrupt government officials in Russia. He works with Transparency International Russia to collect declarations of income - and parse, cleanse and analyze the data. His broad work experience includes coding, interface design, data-flow design, user experience to data analysis, business process modelling, consulting and information security.

Andrew joined Transparency International movement 7 years ago as the director of public relations for the Russian chapter. He now leads Declarator.org project, which is the unified database of income and asset declaration of Russian public officials. Andrew’s interests include data standards, registries of public service employees and the legal limitations for them.

Ethics of automation, dissemination of false news on social media and comparative technology law -- these are what Otar's work involves at the NYU multidisciplinary research center on privacy and cyber security. He was schooled in his native Georgia and Scotland prior to completing B.A. in Economics and Philosophy from NYU Abu Dhabi and Master in Digital Technology Management from the University of Bologna. Otar has been involved in policy, intergovernmental and academic projects in Europe, the Gulf and the US throughout the past decade.

Edgar solves employment growth questions at TransferWise, an innovative international money transfer service that offers clever ways to spend as little as possible. Before that, he worked in Finance where he managed company funds in customer business flow, integrated product services, designed processes and analyzed complex sets of data. Edgar is active in organizing internal events to share knowledge, and build progression path for analysts.

Regardless of where you come from, there is a high probability that Adam speaks your language. He is a technical co-founder at ModelFront, where he works on machine translation quality prediction. His research interests include machine translation, transliteration, text input correction and language identification. He brings engineering experience from startups and products like Google Translate and Android.

Jil eats tech for breakfast! She has spent decades in high-tech industry at the intersection of strategy, finance and technology. She works for eBay and several other high tech companies where her role is to deconstruct the traditional finance process and introduce innovative solutions. She is an NLP coach, public speaker and advocate for women in tech.

Pavel started his career in IT as a software tester performing functional testing of a broker platform. He later started to specialize in technical, non-functional testing (NFT) and has led a large number of testing projects done for brokerages and exchanges. He now is in charge of Exactpro's team of experienced specialists who test and support several platforms for leading international market infrastructures.

Anzor is a millennial AI expert, working in the field of NLP and Data Science. He is member of MaxinAI, a Tbilisi based tech team focusing on machine learning, computer vision, big data, data mining, and more. Anzor has built a price prediction system for real estate and vehicle markets. He’s currently working on a recommendation system for food startup.

Jason has a passion for making data available, informative, engaging, and motivating. He takes lifeless 30 page reports from governments and organisations and turns them into stories that the public can understand and care about. He analyses data, creates story concepts and storyboards, and builds interactive websites.