E.M. Lewis-Jong
What I like:
To put tech in service of important problems.
What I do:
I am the Founder of Mozilla Data Collective - the platform for dataset agency and fair value exchange. We enable partners and communities to share the multilingual, multicultural and multimodal datasets the world needs for better AI, but radically on their own terms.
As the Director at Common Voice, I looked after the world’s largest open crowdsourced speech corpus, spanning 300+ languages and 750,000 open community contributors. The mission - tech that speaks your language.
I designed and executed multi-year AI community data programmes on data creation, curation and governance funded by the US National Science Foundation, NVIDIA, Gates Foundation, and GIZ.
Following the transition of the open source software's transition to a new non-profit home, with my scrappy, mighty little team we expanded the CV platform, build a new companion platform, built incredible partnerships, increasing account holders by 420% and downloads by 1600%.
This is a space to share some of my reflections about community platforms, data governance, inclusive AI, decentralised stewardship - all the things.
Before Mozilla, I was a founding executive in CivTech: leading, launching and growing product from concept stage to venture-backed Series A. I started out my career as an investigative data analyst in public-private impact funds.
I'm a very grateful Sutton Trust Oxbridge Access Summer Schools Alumna, a Rising Star of Tech Awardee and a SheCodes Alumna.
I sit on some really wonderful advisory boards, including as NLP TAP Advisor for Google-backed Lacuna Fund, Industry Board Advisor for Speech Technologies at the University of Groningen, and Data Advisor for the Caribbean Parliaments’ digitisation project.
When I'm not working, I relax by doing PhD research on Human Computer Interaction. I specifically focus on children, data and Intelligent Personal Assistants.
Education:
University of Oxford (BA, MA) [Quarrel Reed Scholar, Opportunities Bursar] University of Sussex, Technology Lab - Informatics & Engineering
(PhD, exp. 2026/7)
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