Harnessing data innovation for migration policy in Europe and Africa

Stefaan Verhulst

Stefaan G. Verhulst is Co-Founder and Chief Research and Development Officer of the Governance Laboratory @NYU (GovLab) where he is responsible for building a research foundation on how to transform governance using advances in science and technology.

He is the Curator and Editor of the Living Library and The Digest.

Verhulst’s latest scholarship centers on how technology can improve people’s lives and the creation of more effective and collaborative forms of governance. Specifically, he is interested in the perils and promise of collaborative technologies and how to harness the unprecedented volume of information to advance the public good.

Before joining NYU full time, Verhulst spent more than a decade as Chief of Research for the Markle Foundation, where he continues to serve as Senior Advisor. At Markle, an operational foundation based in New York, he was responsible for overseeing strategic research on all the priority areas of the Foundation including, for instance: transforming health care using information and technology, re-engineering government to respond to new national security threats, improving people’s lives in developing countries by connecting them to information networks, developing multi-stakeholder networks to tackle global governance challenges, changing education through information technology et al. Many of Markle’s reports have been translated into legislation and executive orders, and have informed the creation of new organizations and businesses.

He is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Culture and Communications at New York University, Senior Research Fellow for the Center for Media and Communications Studies at Central European University in Budapest; and an Affiliated Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Global Communications Studies at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communications.

Previously at Oxford University he co-founded and was the Head of the Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy at the Centre for Socio Legal Studies, and also served as Senior Research Fellow of Wolfson College. He is still an emeritus fellow at Oxford. He also taught several years at the London School of Economics.

Verhulst was the UNESCO Chairholder in Communications Law and Policy for the UK, a former lecturer on Communications Law and Policy issues in Belgium, and Founder and Co-Director of the International Media and Info-Comms Policy and Law Studies at the University of Glasgow School of Law. He has served as a consultant to numerous international and national organizations, including the Council of Europe, the European Commission, UNESCO, World Bank, UNDP, USAID, the UK Department for International Development among others. He has been a grant recipient of the Bertelsmann Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Markle Foundation.

Verhulst has authored and co-authored several books, including: In Search of the Self: Conceptual Approaches to Internet Self Regulation (Routledge, 2001); Convergence in European Communications Regulation (Blackstone, 1999); EC Media Law and Policy (AWL, 1998); Legal Responses to the Changing Media (OUP, 1998); and Broadcasting Reform in India (OUP, 1998) and The Routledge Handbook of Media Law (2013).

Latest reports and papers include, for instance, Innovations in Global Governance: Toward a Distributed Internet Governance Ecosystem (2014) and The Open Data Era in Health and Social Care (2014), and are also available here. Verhulst blogs also regularly on a variety of topics. For instance: Data Collaboratives: Exchanging Data to Improve People’s Lives (2015), and Reimagining Cities (2014).

Verhulst is also founder and editor of numerous journals including the International Journal of Communications Law and Policy, and the Communications Law in Transition Newsletter.

Dario Tarchi

Dario TARCHI, Acting Head of Unit, Demography, Migration and Governance Unit, Joint Research Centre, European Commission.

Dario Tarchi is a physicist by training. He has been with the JRC for more than 20 years. He has been involved, as a Project Leader, in the design, creation and operation of the Knowledge Centre on Migration and Demography since its establishment in 2016. His main responsibilities include designing and implementing knowledge management tools for evidence-informed policymaking, notably the Atlas of Migration and, more recently, the Atlas of Demography.

Alex Pompe

Alex Pompe is a Research Manager on Facebook's Data for Good team. This team builds privacy-protecting data sets to aid humanitarian response work for natural disasters and public health crises. Prior to this he worked on access to information and civil society development programs at an international NGO called IREX, first in Ukraine, next in Namibia, and then in Washington DC. Alex holds a BS in physics from the University of Illinois, and an MS from the University of Michigan.

Andrew Tatem

Andy Tatem is Professor of spatial demography and epidemiology at the University of Southampton and is the Director of WorldPop (www.worldpop.org), leading a group of 30 researchers and data scientists. He is interested in how populations, their characteristics and their dynamics can be mapped at high resolution across low and middle-income countries. His research has led to pioneering approaches to the use and integration of satellite, survey, cell phone and census data to map the distributions and movement patterns of vulnerable populations for disease, disaster and development applications. He runs international collaborations with national governments, UN agencies and data providers, and leads multiple research and operational projects funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust, World Bank, GAVI, Clinton Health Access Initiative and others.

Davis Adieno

Mr. Davis Adieno is the Director of Programs for the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data (GPSDD), based in Nairobi, Kenya. He fosters multi-stakeholder partnerships at the regional level and across sectors through national data roadmap processes that support regional and country priorities for investments and innovations in data ecosystems in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere. Davis previously worked as the Global Partnership's Regional Director for Africa. Prior to this, Davis worked for CIVICUS World Alliance as Senior Advisor of Data, Accountability, and Sustainable Development, and for Development Initiatives as Senior Manager of Strategic Partnerships and Data Use.

Emilio Zagheni

Emilio Zagheni is Executive Director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) and Affiliate Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Washington, where he served as Training Director of the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology. He received his Ph.D. in Demography (2010) and M.A. in Statistics (2008) from U.C. Berkeley. 
Zagheni is best known for his work on combining digital trace data and traditional sources to track and understand migrations and to advance population science. In 2016 he received the Trailblazer Award for Demographic Analysis from the European Association for Population Studies for his role in developing the field of Digital and Computational Demography. As co-chair of the Digital Demography Panel of the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, he has played a key role in favoring collaboration and exchange between demographers, statisticians and computational social scientists.

Frank Laczko

Frank Laczko (PhD) has over 20 years of experience working in the field of international migration. His previous posts with IOM were in Budapest, Vienna and Geneva. He has also acted as a consultant for UNHCR, ILO and OECD. He is currently the Co-Chair of the UN Expert Group on Migration Statistics and Co-Editor of Migration Policy Practice. He has published reports on a wide range of migration issues including migration and development, labour migration, irregular migration, migration and the environment and migration governance.

Jakub Bijak

Dr. Jakub BIJAK is Professor of Statistical Demography at the University of Southampton. He has a background in economics and over 20 years’ work experience in academia and international civil service. His research focuses on demographic uncertainty, population and migration models and forecasts, and the demography of armed conflict. He has been awarded the Allianz European Demographer Award (2015) and the Jerzy Z Holzer Medal (2007) for work on migration modelling. Leader of a European Research Council project “Bayesian agent-based population studies” (www.baps-project.eu), and a Horizon 2020 project “QuantMig: Quantifying Migration Scenarios for Better Policy” (www.quantmig.eu). His email is j.bijak@soton.ac.uk.

Marzia Rango

Marzia Rango leads the work on data innovation, capacity-building and analytics at IOM's GMDAC in Berlin. She is the co-convenor of the Big Data for Migration Alliance, a joint initiative of IOM’s GMDAC, the European Commission Joint Research Centre, and the GovLab at New York University aiming to accelerate the responsible use of new data sources and innovative methods for migration analysis and policymaking. She has been supporting initiatives to strengthen migration data collection, analysis and use for policy in low- and middle-income countries, particularly across Africa. She is the co-editor of IOM’s volume Migration in West and North Africa and across the Mediterranean (2020).

Niklas Sievers

Niklas Sievers works at IOM’s GMDAC at the intersection of international migration and digitalization. He has contributed to several research and advocacy projects exploring the potentials and challenges of using innovative data sources, tools, and methods to inform migration-related policymaking. Before joining IOM’s GMDAC, he has worked in these areas with organizations such as PwC, Refugee Law Clinics, and authorities on the federal and communal levels.
He graduated from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) with an MSc in International Migration and Public Policy (top of class), and he holds two B.A. degrees – Political Science and Cultural Studies – from Leuphana University Lueneburg, funded by several scholarships including from the German National Merit Foundation (Studienstiftung) and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Furthermore, he pursues a PhD degree at the Humboldt University of Berlin with guest affiliations at EUI, Sciences Po Paris and WZB, investigating global citizenship technologies and human rights in asylum procedures.

Nuria Oliver

Nuria Oliver is Co-founder and Vicepresident of ELLIS (The European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems), Co-founder and Scientific Director of the ELLIS Unit Alicante, Chief Data Scientist at Data-Pop Alliance and Chief Scientific Advisor to the Vodafone Institute. Nuria earned her Ph.D. from MIT. She is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE and EurAI. She is the youngest member (and fourth female) of the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering.

She has over 25 years of research experience in human-centric AI. She is the author of over 180 widely cited scientific articles and an inventor of 40+ patents and a public speaker. Her work is regularly featured in the media and has received numerous recognitions, including the Spanish National Computer Science Award, the MIT TR100 (today TR35), Young Innovator Award (first Spanish scientist to receive this award); 2020 Data Scientist of the Year by ESRI, the 2021 King Jaume I award in New Technologies and the 2021 Abie Technology Leadership Award.

In March of 2020, she was appointed Commissioner to the President of the Valencian Government on AI Strategy and Data Science against COVID-19. In that role, she has recently co-led ValenciaIA4COVID, the winning team of the 500k XPRIZE Pandemic Response Challenge. Their work was featured in WIRED, among other media.

Teddy Wilkin

Previously a Research Fellow at Oxford, Teddy has spent the last 12 years working for EU Institutions setting up systems for data collection, analysis and research of mixed migration flows, including irregular migration, people smuggling and fraudulent documents.  Currently at the European Asylum Support Office, Teddy drives several large projects aimed at understanding and predicting flows of asylum seekers to and within the EU so that the agency can provide targeted operational support to Member states under particular pressure, and to support and promote evidence informed policy in Brussels.

Stefano Iacus

Stefano M. Iacus is an officer at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, formerly full professor of Statistics at the University of Milan. R-core member (1999-2017) and R Foundation Member. His fields of expertise are: computational statistics, simulation and inference for stochastic processes, causal inference, textual analysis and numerical finance. Now into migration and demography.

David Reichel

Dr. David Reichel is a project manager in the Research & Data Unit at the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA). He is responsible for managing FRA's research projects on artificial intelligence and on online content moderation. He has extensive experience in working with data and statistics in an international context. Prior to joining FRA in 2014, he worked for the research department of the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD). In addition, he has been teaching courses on quantitative methodology, migration and human rights at Vienna University for several years. He has published numerous articles, working papers and book chapters on issues related to migration and integration statistics, citizenship and human rights.

Gustau Camps-Valls

Gustau Camps-Valls’ research is related to statistical learning, mainly kernel machines and neural networks, for Earth Observation and remote sensing data analysis. Recently, he has been involved in the use of these techniques for migration-related applications.

Jessica Bither

Jessica Bither joined the Robert Bosch Stiftung as a Senior Expert for Migration in March 2021. She is responsible for strategy development and political analysis within the international migration portfolio, and leads the program’s work on technology and migration.  Before joining the foundation, she worked for the German Marshall Fund of the United States for almost a decade at the intersection of migration and foreign policy, most recently as a Migration Fellow.  Jessica is a trained moderator and facilitator and has many years of experience in process design and strategic policy dialogues. She has served as an advisor to different ministries, international organizations and governmental and non-profit stakeholders on current migration policy issues, recently as part of the German EU Presidency on the use of technology in migration management. Jessica holds a master’s degree in international relations from the Free University of Berlin, the University of Potsdam, and the Humboldt University, and a bachelor’s in international studies from Vassar College.

Jose Maria Tárraga

Raphaela Schweiger

Raphaela Schweiger is the Program Director of the Migration Program at the Robert Bosch Stiftung. Her thematic work and expertise include, regional and global migration policy processes as well as stakeholder participation and engagement in national and international migration policy, climate change and migration, the protection of migrants and refugees, the role of technological change as well as migrant integration and inclusion. Prior to her current role, she was a Senior Expert and Senior Project Manager, working on migration, integration and inclusion of refugees and migrants in different departments of the Foundation. Before joining the Foundation, Raphaela Schweiger worked for several NGOs and foundations. She studied Political Science and International Studies/Peace and Conflict Studies in Munich, Frankfurt am Main and Madrid.

Rifat Hossain

Rifat Hossain is the Lead Technical Officer for Normative Research and Evidence Gathering workstream in the WHO Global Health and Migration Programme. Prior to joining this programme, he was the WHO focal point for SDG monitoring and coordinated the WHO inputs and negotiations for the 2020 Comprehensive Review of SDG indicator framework, as well as UHC monitoring. Trained as a physicist, he has had twenty years of experience in official and development statistics within the UN System. Before joining WHO headquarters in 2007, Rifat worked in International Labour Organization and UN Economic Commission for Europe headquarters, both in Geneva. Since joining WHO, he has worked on evidence based policy making as well as provided direct technical assistance to over seventy countries around the world. He was instrumental in many measurement and monitoring framework developments towards the MDGs and in the transition to Agenda 2030, and within the SDG framework linked to health and health related targets

Sara Grubanov-Bošković

Sara Grubanov-Bošković is a scientific project officer at the European Commission’s Knowledge Centre on Migration and Demography. She works mainly on topics of education, skills and labour markets. Prior to this she carried out research at the University of Torino, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Bari. She holds PhD in population and development.

Ana Beduschi

Dr Ana Beduschi is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Exeter and a Senior Research Fellow at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.

Her research and teaching focus on international human rights law, technology (including big data and artificial intelligence), digital law, data protection and privacy, and international migration and refugee law. Her recent publications examine the impact of Covid-19 health status certificates on human rights, the implications of artificial intelligence for international migration management, the opportunities and challenges presented by digital identity, and the implications of big data for international migration and human rights law.

Dominik Hangartner

Dominik Hangartner is Professor of Public Policy at ETH Zurich, affiliate faculty at the ETH AI Center, and Co-Director of the Stanford – Zurich Immigration Policy Lab (IPL).

Dominik received his Ph.D. in Social Science from the University of Bern in 2011. In the same year, he joined the London School of Economics as Assistant Professor and was promoted to tenured Associate Professor in 2013. In 2017, he joined ETH Zurich and was promoted to Full Professor in 2020.

Dominik’s research combines field work and statistics to evaluate and design migration and integration policies and political institutions. He has published over thirty articles, many in leading disciplinary journals such as the American Political Science Review and the American Journal of Political Science as well as general interest journals such as Nature and Science. His research has won several awards, including the Philip Leverhulme Prize, the National Latsis Prize, and an ERC grant.

Eduardo Zambrano

Eduardo Zambrano is a data scientist at the Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). He has more than a decade working on data related projects in academic, private, and humanitarian sectors. His background includes a PhD and a Master in Theoretical Physics and two post-doctoral positions, one at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne and the other Max Planck Institute for Complex Systems. He is expert in Quantum Chaos, Complex Systems, Molecular Dynamics, Econo-physics, Statistics, Big Data, and Machine Learning. Currently, he leads the workings on data modelling, algorithms and overall improvement of DTM’s data products with a view of enhancing the preparedness, response and humanitarian crises.

Helga de Valk

Helga de Valk is director of the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI) and professor of Migration and the life course at the University of Groningen. She leads amongst others an ERC CoG project (MYMOVE). Her research focuses on migration patterns, the transition to adulthood of immigrant youth, union and family formation, the second generation, segregation, and European mobility. She was awarded an ERC Starting Grant (2010 FamiLife) and led a range of national and international projects funded amongst others by Horizon 2020 and Norface. She was editor in chief of the European Journal of Population (2014-2018) and winner of the 2016 European Demography Award.

Leila Ben Ali

Leila Ben Ali-Kraiem is a Tunisian Engineer in Statistics with 32 years of national and international experiences in statistics, gender, management and leadership, project management, technical assistance, building capacities, monitoring planning and design and evaluation of development projects, partnership development with various organizations such as WB, ESCWA, CIDA, UNDP, UNECA, AfDB, EU, and UNSD. In her country she was Chief Engineer in statistics at the National Institute of Statistics (1989-1994), Head of planning, programmes and databases Division (1994-2001) and Director of planning, studies and evaluation, (2001-2005) in the Ministry of Woman and Family Affairs. She also worked as Lecturer in Statistics and Demography in the Social Science & Arts Faculty, University of Sfax (2006-2007).

She has been working with the African Union Commission (AUC) as a Head of Gender Policy and Development at the Women, Gender and Development Directorate (WGDD) since 2007, and in 2014 she was nominated as Ag. Director of WGDD (2014-2015). In 2016, she was appointed as Head of Statistics Division in the Economic Affairs Department (EAD) for the establishment and operationalization of the African Union Institute for Statistics (STATAFRIC) based in Tunis, Tunisia; in 2021 she was also appointed Ag. Director of the African Migration Observatory in Rabat, Morocco and responsible for its operationalization.

Lucy Daxbacher

Lucy Daxbacher is a Diplomat and Migration Governance Expert. She has a broad experience in diplomacy, regional integration, free movement of person’s regimes, forced displacement, labour migration governance, and stabilisation programmes across East, West and the Horn of Africa. In her current role at IGAD, she works in the landscape of regular and irregular migration, cyclical conflict, climate change, natural disasters and mass displacement across IGAD Region. Her knowledge in the migration governance sector is backed up by over 20 years of working in social and political processes towards good governance and security. Lucy Daxbacher has worked in collaboration with national Governments, Regional Economic Communication and CSOs including EAC, IGAD, ICGLR, AU, ECOWAS, Development Partners namely EU, World Bank, DFID, UNICEF, UN IOM, UN ILO, UNICEF and NGOs. She is a PhD student of International Diplomacy (With Security Aspects) at Galilee International Management Institute, Israel/Nova Universa Slovenia. She holds a Master’s Degree in Social Sector Planning and Management from Makerere University, is an alumnae of Austrian Study Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution, Stadt Schleining Austria, UN ILO International Training Centre Turin, Italy (labour governance) and Galilee International Management Institute (GIMI), Israel (Diplomacy and Security Studies). Contact: Lucy.Daxbacher@igad.int and Tel: +256 777 140012. Twitter: @LucyDaxbacher

Rob Trigwell

Rob Trigwell has a humanitarian relief background, having worked with NGOs and the UN across the Middle East, East Africa and Asia. Rob currently works within the Global Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) team, where he co-coordinates the Analytical, Knowledge and Output (AKO) quality Unit, a recently established research unit part of the Global DTM team based in London. The role of the unit is to enhance engagement with academic institutions to expand DTMs knowledge, enhance its analytical capacities and harness the use of its wealth of data. Rob is currently a co-investigator of the academic research project “Data & Displacement” and co-leads of the Data Responsibility Working Group (DRWG).

Tim Breitkreuz

Tim Breitkreuz is the responsible project manager of a project on migration forecasting and data analysis at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees in Germany (BAMF). Prior to his current role, he had positions at the staff of the president and in the area of asylum law at BAMF. Before joining the public administration, Tim Breitkreuz worked in the field of German development cooperation and studied Political Science, Public Law and International Studies/Peace and Conflict Studies in Tübingen, Frankfurt am Main, Oslo and Bangkok.

Tuba Bircan

Dr. Tuba Bircan is a research professor at the Dept. of Sociology and the research coordinator at the Interface Demography, at the Free University of Brussels. She is also affiliated as a senior research associate at HIVA, Catholic University of Leuven. As a social scientist with statistics background, her research interests cover a wide range from migration, gender, equal opportunities, social and public policies to new methodologies and use of Big Data and AI for studying societal challenges. She is a follower of open science and science for society. She is currently leading the H2020 funded HumMingBird-Enhanced Migration Measures from a Multidimensional Perspective project. She has published mainly on the methodological aspects of migration studies, inclusive policies and inequalities.

Ulrich Weinbrenner

Wole Ademola Adewole

Wole Ademola Adewole is an implementation coordinator with Flowminder Foundation where he works with In-country partners and government agencies to facilitate the use of data for evidence-based decision-making. He holds a bachelor's degree in Urban Planning and a Master's in Geographical Information Systems and Remote Sensing with a keen focus on population dynamics. Leveraging his over 5 years of working experience, he has contributed to Flowminder's support to countries in leveraging the use of mobility and geospatial data for informed decisions across various sectors. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemics, Wole has provided technical support to the COVID-19 Presidential Task Force in Nigeria on leveraging data insight for interventions and vaccination strategies. He also coordinates the use of mobility insight derived from mobile phone data to support policies and interventions in Ghana through the Data for Good project. Over the years, he has been involved in works covering a wide array of areas from service placement optimisation, population mapping, urban planning, and capacity strengthening in LMICs.

Diego Iturralde

Diego Iturralde is Chief Director for Demography and Population Statistics at Statistics South Africa. As part of his responsibilities he is responsible for the official population estimates published by this organisation as well as thematic analysis and research related to mortality, fertility and migration. Mr Iturralde is co-chair of the expert group on international migration statistics, an advisor to the IOM-GMDAC in Berlin. Mr Iturralde is also a chair of one of the working group chairs for the IDAC which focusses on indicators of child migration. At a regional level he serves on the STG for International Migration of the African Union, the African Migration Data Network, represents the IUSSP panel on International Migration particularly with regards to initiatives related to a World Migration Survey and also forms part of various SADC and national structures with regards to migration measurement and management. Mr Iturralde’s interests lie in migration measurement across all forms of data with the view to inform policy from an evidence based perspective as well as building capacity with regards to innovative ways of producing migration indicators as well as the use of innovative sources of data for the same purpose.

Mr Iturralde holds two masters degrees in Sociology and Urban & Regional Science from the Universities of Pretoria and Stellenbosch respectively as well as two post graduate diplomas in Demography and Population Science from the University of Witwatersrand (Wits).