OpenMined Featured Contributor: June 2020

Where are you based?

"New York City"

What do you do?

"I’m a Product Manager. I worked for Google Maps, YouTube and recently shifted gears and joined a small new startup in the News space called River."

What are your specialties?

"I spend most of my time researching technology trends, learning about user needs, building product strategies and roadmaps. My background is in Computer Science so I mainly focus on technical products that utilize Machine Learning and data science. Feel free to hit me up if you ever need product help with your recommendation system :)"

How and when did you originally come across OpenMined?

"A few months ago I was looking for volunteer opportunities related to COVID that needed Product Management support. A friend introduced me to OpenMined and the rest is history. I was immediately blown away by the overall mission and by how greatly it can improve people's lives."

What was the first thing you started working on within OpenMined?

"I helped define our long-term product goals, organize our core use cases and design our MVPs (Minimal Viable Products)."

And what are you working on now?

"I continue on our long-term planning, but in the near future I will spend most of my time in the Governance space and the Opus project."

What would you say to someone who wants to start contributing?

"Besides an incredibly interesting engineering challenge, you’ll be contributing to some of the most important technologies that could help achieve data privacy and accountability. A world where people own and control the only copy of their data is a world where products and services are aligned with the best interest of the people.

My advice is to dare to think big!"

Please recommend one interesting book, podcast or resource to the OpenMined community.

"“21 Lessons for the 21st Century” by Yuval Noah Harari (especially chapter 4: “Those who own the data own the future”) and “Data and Goliath” by Bruce Schneier."