Eric Berlow

An ecologist, data scientist, and co-founder of Vibrant Data, Eric Berlow knows just how significant the intersection of data and AI is to business. Machines can now recognize people in images better than humans can, instantly translate languages, and tell how you’re feeling before you know it yourself. To keep up, businesses are investing heavily in algorithms and engineers, creating entire departments in order to automate processes or glean previously inaccessible insights. But the data we use is the bloodline that feeds these algorithms. In his clear and timely talks, Berlow shares the complexity of the data and AI supply chain, and how you can nourish your data ecosystem.

Eric Berlow has spent the past twenty years enabling people to make data-driven decisions as a complexity scientist and data entrepreneur. In an increasingly interconnected and AI-optimized world, Berlow, a TED Senior Fellow, helps bring the potential of AI—the technology and the business of it—into view. The biggest driver of success in AI is not the algorithms, he explains, it is the data. In fact, the basic AI algorithms we use today have been around for decades. What has changed is the way we’ve come to understand, collect, and employ big data. Berlow’s talks show you the ways in which a healthy data ecosystem is more critical than code for developing AI that works for you.

Berlow was the co-founder and CEO of Vibrant Data, a data science company which built tools, powered by machine learning, to visually explore high dimensional data. The company was acquired by Rakuten in 2016, where Berlow led product innovation for data insights from the world’s largest e-commerce panel. Prior to that, Berlow was the founding director of the University of California’s first science institute in Yosemite National Park, where he co-led efforts to leverage data and machine learning for facilitating intelligent conservation policy. Berlow is internationally recognized for his research on ecological complexity, with articles in Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that have received Thomson Reuter’s Most Highly Cited Papers awards. His two TED Talks on finding hidden patterns in complex data have received over 2 million views. Berlow is the recipient of a TED Fellowship, a TED Senior Fellowship, an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Fellowship, and a National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis Fellowship. Berlow holds a BA from Brown University and a PhD in Ecology from Oregon State University.