Matt Jones is a professor of history at Columbia University. He specializes in the history of science and technology, focused on early modern Europe and on recent information technologies. He chairs the Committee on the Core and Contemporary Civilization. Based on research funded by the National Science Foundation, he is finishing a philosophical, technical and labor history of calculating machines from Pascal to Babbage.

Chris Wiggins is an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University and the Chief Data Scientist at The New York Times. At Columbia he is a founding member of the executive committee of the Data Science Institute, and of 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. Prior to joining the faculty at Columbia he was a Courant Instructor at NYU (1998-2001) and earned his PhD at Princeton University (1993-1998) in theoretical physics. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and is a recipient of Columbia's Avanessians Diversity Award.