About me

I am an Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science at Imperial College London where I head the Computational Privacy Group. I'm currently a Special Adviser on AI and Data Protection to EC Justice Commissioner Reynders and a Parliament-appointed expert to the Belgian Data Protection Agency. In 2018-2019, I was a Special Adviser to EC Commissioner Vestager for who I co-authored the Competition policy for the digital era report. I'm affiliated with the Data Science Institute and Department of Computing. I was previously a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard working with Latanya Sweeney and Gary King and I received my PhD from MIT under the supervision of Alex "Sandy" Pentland (250-words bio).

I am looking for motivated PhD students to join our Computational Privacy Group at Imperial College. All qualified candidates are strongly encouraged to apply.

My research aims at understanding how the unicity of human behavior impacts the privacy of individuals in large-scale metadata datasets. My work has been covered in The New York Times, BBC News, CNN, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Le Monde, Die Spiegel, Die Zeit, El Pais, and in reports of the World Economic Forum, United Nations, OECD, FTC, and the European Commission, as well as in my talks at TEDxLLN and TEDxULg. I recently wrote a white paper for Brookings on the use and privacy metadata as well as op-eds for the World Economic Forum, Christian Science Monitor, and Le Monde. I worked for the Boston Consulting Group and acted as an expert for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United Nations. I was recently named an Innovator under 35 for Belgium (TR35). I am a fellow of the ID³ Foundation, the B.A.E.F. Foundation, and a research associate at Data-Pop. I am organizing NetMob, the International Conference on the Analysis of Mobile Phone Datasets, and I am serving on numerous program committee.