From Yahoo! News
Meet DJ Patil: Obama’s Big Data dude
By Alyssa Bereznak
DJ Patil is still settling into his White House office. It’s by far the most prestigious place he’s ever worked....
In February, President Barack Obama added Patil, a cheerful Californian who still laments the lack of authentic Mexican food in D.C., to the growing roster of Silicon Valley-bred digerati who have been recruited to shore up the White House’s tech capabilities. His official job title is chief data scientist and deputy chief technology officer for data policy. Unofficially, he is responsible for nothing short of harnessing the extraordinary power of the federal government’s hundreds of thousands of data sets...
“The biggest challenge for DJ is going to be human and organizational, rather than technical,” said Steven Weber, a professor at Berkeley’s School of Information and Political Science who has interacted with Patil in the field. “I don’t think he’s going to be able to walk into that office and say, ‘Look at all this great data we have, we can build this and we can build that, we can build this and we can build that.’ But I know that’s going to go through his head.”