Jacopo Ottaviani

Jacopo Ottaviani is an award-winning computer scientist and data expert who works as Code for Africa’s Chief Data Officer (CDO). As an ICFJ Knight Fellow in 2016-2019, Jacopo shaped Code for Africa’s data team and designed data journalism programmes supported by the World Bank, Google News Initiative, GIZ and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, spearheading work in countries like Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, Uganda and Senegal.

Jacopo’s most recent work combines satellite data with drone imagery and forensic data to produce strategic data aggregations and visualisations that tackle burning social issues such as urban inequality (for the Slumscapes project with Thomson Reuters) and immigration (for the Search & Rescue data portal for MSF), land rights (for HOTOSM, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap, and InfoNile, an open data initiative on water security in the Nile Basin), deforestation (with the Pulitzer Center) and other SDGs (with UNDP and the Arab Development Portal).

His unique mix of technical skills, as a computer scientist and data journalist, has resulted in a series of projects published by, among others, Thomson Reuters Foundation (UK), Der Spiegel (Germany), El País (Spain), Al Jazeera International (global), De Correspondent (Netherlands) and Internazionale (Italy).