INVI hires "data rebel" as new Chief Analyst
Think tank INVI wants to harness the power of technology to tame society's wild problems. The institute hires new data 'rebel' as Chief Analyst to lead the analytics team and further develop INVI's Wild Problems Model.
On Friday, INVI's Model for Wild Problems will be launched at a large-scale and sold-out hearing at Christiansborg. A groundbreaking model that uses statistical methods and AI technology to equip the country's rulers to deal more effectively with society's wild problems. That's why INVI has just added another player to the team. A new Chief Analyst who will lead the further development of the model. Her name is Sofie Burgos-Thorsen and her shirt reads REBEL REBEL, which she brought home from a natural wine bar of the same name in Boston.
For the past 10 years Sofie Burgos-Thorsen has worked with digital innovation, participatory design, artificial intelligence and urban planning across research and practice with experience from Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies, Techfestival Copenhagen, and Gehl Architects. She is a trained sociologist, holds a PhD from Tekno-Antropologisk Laboratorium and MIT and is passionate about bridging data science, design justice, and sociological analysis to create social change in strategy, design and policy.
"I have always worked to find new solutions to society's complex problems and believe that the crises we face today are fundamentally a crisis in our collective imagination. It is clear that our ability to overcome political polarization, solve the climate and biodiversity crisis, or create cities where everyone feels at home depends on rethinking our traditional knowledge practices and finding new ways to map wild problems," says Sofie Burgos-Thorsen.
From research to frontrunner
With 5 years as a researcher and teacher at the Techno-Anthropology Laboratory, Sofie is an expert in exploring what opportunities and challenges new technologies and platforms - from social media to artificial intelligence - offer for our understanding of society's most complex problems, exemplified by projects like 'Do You Live in a Bubble' that rethink our idea of political polarization in the city.
During 4 years in the R&D unit at Gehl Architects, she has worked across Copenhagen and New York to connect digital transformation to urban planning and questions of how we create more sustainable, equitable, and inclusive cities. For example, she has spearheaded the development of new digital tools for citizen engagement and founded and ledthe Urban Belonging Project. An initiative that in 2022-23 was exhibited at Urban 13, Copenhagen Architecture Festival and Ars Electronica, and received the 2023 EU Citizen Science Award.
A rebel with a data feminist approach
Unique to Sofie's work with data is a distinct data feminist approach, based on a critical approach to power and entrenched knowledge systems, which she is passionate about turning upside down and pushing. Therefore, she always asks the question: What knowledge and experience are we missing out on with the conventional methods and tools we use to decide hard things? Can we expand our data imagination by including a greater diversity of perspectives - especially the people who experience the problems up close, who have relevant experience and knowledge that is often overlooked or ignored? According to Sofie, this means being curious and open to the possibilities of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence - but without being blind to the biases and challenges that can also be associated with them.
"Traditional measurement methods only lead us to see problems within our preconceived expectations of them. In doing so, we let our idea of the future be limited by the way we have approached problems until now. This won't get us very far. We need to open up problems instead of closing them down. Unfold them and learn to navigate complexity rather than artificially limiting them. I believe we can leverage AI to get much better at this while contributing critically to the positive development of the technology."
This is exactly the kind of digital innovation and desire to rethink how we make decisions and expand the ocean of knowledge that INVI has launched with the design of the think tank's Wild Problem Model. This is why INVI's analytics team and work with AI-driven analytics will be led by another professional rebel - a data rebel:
"Like myself, INVI is not afraid to rock the boat and try to do things in new ways, and that is one of the key reasons why I accepted the position," concludes Sofie Burgos-Thorsen, who joined INVI on August 15, 2024.
Background information
Sofie Burgos-Thorsen is a sociologist from the University of Copenhagen and holds a PhD in data science and urban planning from Aalborg University and MIT's Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. Sofie's CV includes 4 years in the R&D unit at Gehl Architects, as well as 5 years as a researcher and teacher at the Techno-Anthropological Laboratory at Aalborg University.
In addition, Sofie is a jury member at Ars Electronica, a member of the Soft City Sensing & Digital Placemaking network, founded by Professor Anders Koed Madsen. She has been a guest lecturer at leading universities such as New York Institute of Technology, MIT, Northeastern University, Politecnico di Milano, and Visual Methodologies Collective in Amsterdam.
Prior to joining INVI, Sofie has recently led thought-provoking experiments with Generative AI technology for participatory urban planning, such as the 'Planning for People, Place, and Planet' project, funded by the University of Copenhagen Green Solutions Center. Here, she and research colleagues have used a combination of digital photovoice and generative AI to involve citizens and professionals in mapping experiences of biodiversity and nature in the city and creating different scenarios for future green neighborhoods. Sofie has also been a leading figure in the award-winning project 'From Deep Data to Dynamic District' - a collaboration between Aalborg University, Henning Larsen, and Rambøll Management Consulting. For the idea competition about the future of Refshaleøen, the project group harvested 40,000 Instagram images from Refshaleøen, uploaded over 10 years, and used vision AI technology to find patterns in the images to then use Generative AI models like Midjourney to create visions for the future of Refshaleøen, based on the identified visual patterns.