The Newsletter
I grew up wanting to understand how the world works—falling asleep to news radio and reading dog-earing copies of The Economist. That curiosity led me to a quantitative political science PhD. I spent thousands of hours running analyses, filling notebooks with questions, and interviewing practitioners and scholars—all in pursuit of learning how power moves.
When my doctorate ended, I turned to something I'd loved since childhood: programming. I helped build open source tools for disaster relief and election monitoring, founding a data visualization startup, and data and machine learning roles at several companies. Today, I lead AI and data engineering at the Wikimedia Foundation—the nonprofit behind Wikipedia. Along the way, I’ve written a hands-on AI book, hosted a popular ML podcast, created best-selling flashcards on AI, and published hundreds of ML tutorials.
But that voice in the back of my mind — the little kid who always wanted to understand how the world worked — never left me. So, twenty-five years later after this journey began, this newsletter is my (previously private) working notes on the two threads that have defined my life: geopolitics and applied machine learning.
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The Author
Chris Albon is the Director of Machine Learning and Data Engineering at the Wikimedia Foundation. Before that, Chris was the Director of Data Science in three previous roles and founded a data visualization company. He has worked in mission-driven technology companies and non-profits for over ten years, including disaster relief, healthcare, humanitarian aid, anti-corruption, conservation, and free knowledge. Chris has a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Davis.