About the Speaker

Jean-Baptiste Michel is a French and Mauritian scientist at Harvard University, and the founder of Quantified Labs in Brooklyn, NY. His research focuses on big data at the interface of biology, the social sciences and the web. In 2012, Jean-Baptiste was named a TED Fellow, a Visiting Faculty at Google and one of Forbes ‘30 under 30,’ the brightest young minds in the sciences. He is an Engineer of Ecole Polytechnique (Paris), and received an MS in Applied Math and a PhD in Systems Biology from Harvard.

Together with Erez Lieberman Aiden, Jean-Baptiste developed quantitative approaches to the study of history and culture that rely on computational analysis of a significant fraction of the historical record, an approach they call "Culturomics." Their work led to the creation of the Google Ngram Viewer, a website for browsing cultural trends that was visited more than 3 million times in the 24 hours after its launch. Their research has been featured on the covers of Nature and Science and on the front page of the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal. Their talk describing this work, at TED.com, has been viewed more than a million times. They are the authors of the forthcoming book, Uncharted: Big Data and an Emerging Science of Human History (Riverhead Books).

This presentation began at 9:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (UTC 13:30) and was followed by a question and answer session at 11:00 a.m. (UTC 15:00). The public was invited to attend this free presentation in person or remotely via WebEx.

About the OCLC Research Distinguished Seminar Series

The OCLC Research Distinguished Seminar Series was established in 1978 to encourage the exchange of ideas across the barriers of time, space and disciplines. Each year we invite distinguished professionals to our headquarters in Dublin, Ohio to give presentations on topics of current interest. Speakers may discuss recently completed or early-stage research that they have undertaken or report other types of professional activity. Some topics align closely with our current research directions, while others represent areas of interest to the library and information science community that are not formally being studied by our researchers. Diversity of topics is essential to meeting the purpose of the Distinguished Seminar Series. See our Distinguished Seminar Series page for a list of previous speakers and their presentations.