César A. Hidalgo leads the Macro Connections group at The MIT Media Lab and is also an Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT. Hidalgo's work focuses on understanding the evolution of information in natural, social, and economic systems, and on the development of big data visualization engines that make available unwieldy volumes of data. Hidalgo's academic publications have been cited more than 5,000 times and his visualization engines have received more than 8 million visits. He is the author of Why Information Grows (Basic Books, 2015) and the co-author of The Atlas of Economic Complexity (MIT Press, 2014). He lives in Somerville Massachusetts with his wife Anna and their daughter Iris.