Description: Penelope solves the math puzzle to make sure the guests at her birthday party can enjoy their favorite slice of pizza! Penelope prefers plain but Barnaby Barchart, Laney Line, and Bertie Boxplot all like toppings. Data visualization with the Vizkidz!
Brief description: Liv Buli is a data journalist, and the creator and author of the Vizkidz book series. Having spent time in the traditional newsroom, Buli became fascinated by the phenomenon of "big data" early on and soon found herself working at the intersection of journalism, tech and creative industries. Originally from Norway, Buli has been based in New York for the last decade, where she studied for her master's degree in Journalism from NYU and has worked as a data journalist with music analytics startup Next Big Sound and more recently Pandora Music. She is also an author and instructor with Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she teaches on the topic of data analytics. Buli has given talks and keynotes at conferences around the world, from Brisbane, to Chile, to New York City classrooms. Among them are SXSW, CMJ, Future of Music Policy Summit, SF Music Tech, BigSound, ByLarm, GOTO and more. Mashable wrote about Buli's work in an article on 10 awesome gigs in STEM, and she was recently chosen as one of the STEM 10 by California Technologies and Amy Poehler's Smart Girls. Having spent years working with and championing data analytics in a creative industry, she knows all too well how data literacy presents a massive challenge in today's connected digital age. That's how she came up with the idea of writing great stories that teach kids how to understand and interpret data. The result is Vizkidz. It is her hope that by introducing computational thinking and the fundamental concepts of data analysis to children, this will given kids a head start and get them excited about future careers in STEM.