Biography

Angela Newell is an innovation strategy and policy expert with deep expertise in open data, open source software, and Machine Learning and AI with specializations in governance and AI and data literacy. She is a builder of five community and/or technology organizations from the ground up, all of which are in operation and two of which are more than a decade old. Dr. Newell’s research focuses on innovation, Artificial Intelligence and Digital Public Goods and Infrastructure, and open AI, data, and scholarship. Her research has been conducted in association with and used by the Obama Administration, the Pena Nieto administration, and she is currently working with the United Nations on metrics and open source software. Her research has been funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Intel, IBM, the Grable Foundation, and National Science Foundation. She is a Founding Member of the Open Forum for AI, an Advisory Board Member for CURIOSS (CURIOSS is a Community for University and Research Institution OSPOs, and a Member of the Apereo Foundation Board. 

At The University of Texas at Austin, in the Chief Information Office, she serves as the Executive Director of Innovation and Director of the Open Source Program Office. As the Executive Director of Innovation, she is responsible for developing and managing an Innovation Lab and governance and evaluation for the UT AI Studio. In addition, she is determining AI research support tools for university researchers. 

As Director of the Open Source Program Office, she co-created the program office from the ground up including programming, staffing, communications to provide consultation, training, resources for researchers using open source software and open source AI. In addition, the office researches impacts and innovation outcomes of open source software in research institutions. She participates as a member in several national and international open source in research organization groups and is part of a team defining standards for open source AI and its role in research.

Dr. Newell is an occasional Lecturer for the McCombs School of Business the LBJ School of Public Affairs in the following subjects:

o   Public Policy Analysis | Public Policy Theory

o   Information Policy

o   Statistics

o   Management Information Systems

o   Information and Communications Technologies for Development

o   Cyber Security Strategy

o   Data and Computing and Ethics

o   Founder and Instructor, UT Austin IT Academy providing training for cloud foundations, AI/ML