Pedro Reynolds-Cuellar was selected as one of the winners of the inaugural MIT Prize for Open Data.  The MIT School of Science and the MIT Libraries present the inaugural MIT Prize for Open Data to highlight the value of open data at MIT and to encourage the next generation of researchers.

Pedro, along with Diana Duarte, the Diversa team, and a network of community partners and universities, presented Retos:  an open-data platform for detailed documentation and sharing of local innovations from under-resourced settings. The platform also also aids with matching hundreds of university students with opportunities and challenges from rural collectives.

Pedro is a Doctoral Student based at the Space Enabled Group in the MIT Media Lab and the Future Heritage Lab at the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology. He studied Linguistics at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia where he worked on articulatory phonetics and signal processing. He completed his masters with the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab, where he focused on designing interactions to explore what role can social robots have in fostering children's socio-emotional skills—empathy in particular. Currently, his work focuses on studying and documenting design histories and practices leading to the creation of ancestral technologies in Colombia. This is a category of technologies with deep cultural, ecological and socio-historical value for the people and places where they were created. Reynolds-Cuellar uses insights from this work to propose design practices and pedagogical approaches that lead to the development of more sustainable and just technologies.