# David Dao (@daviddao.org)

Profile: https://sifa.id/p/daviddao.org
Headline: Chief Scientist at GainForest | Protocol Labs R&D | Dr. sc. ETH Zurich | XPRIZE Winner | WEF Davos 50 | prev: AI Researcher at UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT
Website: https://daviddao.org

## About

Dr. David Dao is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of GainForest.Earth, a decentralized science non-profit leveraging technology to address the climate and biodiversity crisis supporting over 800 communities including the Amazon rainforest, East Africa and South-East Asia. His work has earned him and GainForest several awards including the XPRIZE Rainforest, WEF Davos 50 and Ethereum Next Billion. In addition, David is the Economies & Governance Lead of Protocol Labs R\&D, aiming to innovate and scale decentralized systems and data-sovereign AI for governance, economies and public goods funding. David studied computer science at ETH Zurich, MIT, UC Berkeley, TUM and Stanford where his scientific work has been widely cited (2100+, h-index 17). He completed his PhD in AI Systems at ETH Zurich where he co-developed efficient algorithms for data valuation. David is an early open-source contributor to libraries such as TensorFlow and maintains a widely starred repository on ethical AI (7000+). His work has been featured in several media including WEF, TEDx, New York Times, BBC4, and Channel News Asia.

## Experience

- **Research Fellow at Oasis Labs** (2019 – 2019)
  Leading Kara project, a privacy-preserving data market for medical research build upon Oasis' blockchain technology in joint collaboration with Stanford Medical School and Berkeley University
- **Google Summer of Code Intern at Google** (2014 – 2014)
  Developed interactive data visualization applications for biological data during my Google Summer of Code Fellowship mentored by EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute and the BioJS project. Published one journal paper: https://elifesciences.org/content/4/e07009
- **Doctoral Student at ETH Zürich** (2017 – 2023)
  Novel AI and Data Systems for Sustainable Development and Dignified Work
- **Co-Founder & Chief Scientist at GainForest.Earth** (2022 – present)
  GainForest is a swiss-based nature tech non-profit that decentralizes nature finance and research. Winner of the XPRIZE Rainforest, Microsoft AI for Earth, Handelsblatt & BCG Rolemodel Award, Klarna AI for Climate Resilience and Ethereum Next Billion Fellowship.
  
  https://gainforest.earth
- **Co-Lead, PL R&D at Protocol Labs** (2025 – present)
  Leading research on economies & governance, especially on decision sovereignty, public goods funding, agentic impact evaluation and impact certification
- **Machine Learning Intern at Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America, Inc.** (2016 – 2017)
  Applying deep learning to autonomous driving and planning in intelligent vehicles and co-founded internal machine learning scrum team. Started and supervised projects in trajectory learning and traffic interaction prediction.
- **Graduate Researcher at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard** (2015 – 2016)
  Applying user-friendly machine learning and deep neural networks for image analysis and chemical-genetic profiling in the Carpenter group at the Broad Institute.
  
  Published two journal papers: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/057976, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ymeth.2016.08.018
- **Graduate Researcher at Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies (HITS)** (2014 – 2015)
  Research in pattern recognition, algorithm engineering and bioinformatics at Stamatakis Group. Published one book chapter: http://sco.h-its.org/exelixis/pubs/Exelixis-RRDR-2013-6.pdf
- **Senior Researcher / PostDoc at ETH Zürich** (2023 – 2024)
  Co-Lead of $10M XPRIZE Rainforest Winner ETH BiodivX, a scientific consortium of 14 institutions and 52 members. Winner of the "most impactful technology" XPRIZE award.
  
  2000+ citations with h-index 17
- **Adjunct Researcher in Autonomous Driving at Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America, Inc.** (2017 – 2018)
  Self-supervised visual planning with deep dynamics models (in collaboration with ETH Zurich)

## Education

- **ETH Zurich** — Dr. sc. ETH Zürich (2017 – 2023)
- **Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)** — Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.)
- **University of California, Berkeley** — Research Fellowship (2018 – 2019)
- **Stanford University** — Visiting Researcher (2019 – 2019)
- **Technical University Munich** — Master of Science (M.Sc.) with Distinction

## Skills

- JavaScript
- Computer Vision
- Web Development
- Algorithms
- Machine Learning
- C++
- Pattern Recognition
- Machine Translation
- Data Mining
- TensorFlow
- Deep Learning
- Bioinformatics
- Python
- Data Visualization
- D3.js
- Matlab
- C
- Go

## Certifications

- Advanced Open Water Diver — PADI
- Sailing License (D Schein) — Stadt Zürich

## Volunteering

- Mentor (Scientist) at Creative Destruction Lab
- Global Shaper at World Economic Forum
- Climate Leader at The Climate Reality Project
- COP Delegate at Swiss Youth for Climate
- Founder and Chair, Student Chapter Munich at Association for Computing Machinery
- Co-organizer of first refugee education conference at Harvard at Harvard Graduate School of Education
- Broad NextGen at Broad Institute
- AI Education at Meetup
- Regional Group at Amnesty International

## Honors and awards

- Additional Honors & Awards
- Invited Talks & Tutorials
- Research Grants
- Prizes

## Languages

- German (native)
- English (full_professional)
- Portuguese (elementary)
- Cantonese (native)

## Other profiles

- website: https://daviddao.org
- linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dwddao