The Department of Sociology at Cambridge has a distinctive profile as a centre of excellence for outstanding work in social theory and empirical sociological research. Sociology in Cambridge is also practised and taught in an interdisciplinary context, with particularly strong connections with politics, psychology, anthropology, economics and history.
Role in the project: Dr Mihály Fazekas will be the main project coordinator, coordinating the scientific activities across all Work Packages. He will also lead on indicator development (Work Package 3)
Biography: Dr Fazekas has been pioneering the use of ‘Big Data’ for social sciences research, especially for measuring and analysing corruption and administrative quality across Europe. He uses mixed research methods while working in interdisciplinary teams of IT specialists, practitioners, and social scientists in order to collect, structure, and clean large administrative datasets generated by governments. One of his primary areas of work is public procurement and high-level corruption.
Role in the project: Fiona Harrison is the Project Manager for the consortium, responsible for managing coordinating the activities of all partners, ensuring that the terms of the EC Grant Agreement are complied with and collecting and analysing data.
Biography: Fiona Harrison has an LLM in International Human Rights Law and has run a number of large EC-funded projects within the international NGO sector, primarily in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states. Her main areas of interest are access to information, transparency of media ownership and freedom of expression /media freedom. She is particularly interested in the identification of practical and legal obstacles to the implementation of human rights compliant laws.
Role in the project: Bence Tóth is a Research Assistant in the Department of Sociology.
Biography: Shortly after finishing his studies at Central European University (Economic Policy) Bence started working at Corruption Research Centre Budapest. His tasks were focusing on public procurement data analysis. Bence had also technical duties related to the Hungarian PP database, and also worked extensively on a collusion indicator toolkit for PP markets.
Role in the project: Junior Data Extraction
Biography: Marek graduated from Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, with specialization in Software Systems focussing on database systems. He has more than three years experience as C++ programmer and more than half a year experience as Junior .NET programmer. One of Marek's spheres of interest is transparency of public administration.
Role in the project: Junior Data Extraction Programmer
Jakub has a long time experience with all the aspects of software development process. As a Solution Architect, he was responsible for an architectural design of multiple software products used in a corporate and public sector as well. As a Project manager, he is experienced in managing complex teams of developers, analysts, testers and dev ops. He was working on large scale software products for first-class companies such a PwC, Accenture, BMW, Deloitte etc.
Role in the project: Project Manager for Building Data Collection and Analysis System
Jan has more than 10 years of experience in software development that he gained on various projects as a PHP and Java programmer and project manager. Computers have always been his hobby since he got his first Commodore 64 approximately 25 years ago and it led him to the University of West Bohemia where he graduated in 2010 as a software engineer. He has been interested in public procurements for last 5 years. Since 2011 he participated in several projects related to publishing information about public tenders, checking a quality and validity of published data and improving standards for machine-readable interfaces.
Role in project: Junior Data Extraction Manager for Public Procurement Data
Tomáš graduated from the Department of Cybernetics at the University of West Bohemia in 2010. Already during his studies he became interested in web technologies and developing web applications. He has more than 4 years of working experience in this field, primarily in PHP, as well as significant experience in automated data processing and web scraping.
Role in the project: Senior Data Extraction
Tomáš received his masters degree in computer science from the Charles University in Prague. He started gaining 5+ years experience in the field of public procurement during research for his bachelor and master theses, followed by cooperating on several projects on procurement data publication, transparency and validation. Besides that Tomáš has advanced work experience in the entire software development process by working on projects for major Czech banks and insurance companies. Before joining the Digiwhist project, Tomáš worked as a corporate performance management consultant on financial planning and reporting projects.
Role in the project: Daniel is a Research Assistant in the Department of Sociology
Biography: Daniel has an undergraduate degree in Economics and a Masters in Political Science. He has worked for 4 years in public policy and consulting in Brazil and in the UK. He is currently doing a PhD at University of Cambridge studying corruption and policy making.
