Chiara Francalanci was born in 1968 in Piacenza (Italy). She graduated in Electronic Engineering from Politecnico di Milano in 1991, where she has also completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1996. She has worked for two years as a junior consultant in Nolan Norton & Co. (now KPMG), assessing IT management maturity with the balanced scorecard. With the support of Nolan Norton & Co., she has worked for two years at the Harvard Business School, where she also graduated in Management of the Information Systems Resource. She has extensively consulted in the financial, retail and manufacturing industries, both in Europe and the U.S. In 2001, she became associate professor of business information systems at Politecnico di Milano. She has international teaching experience and consolidated management skills of research projects, both private- and public-funded, Italian and European. She has designed, developed, patented and sold to companies several innovative algorithms and systems. She has coordinated industrial projects on algorithms for customer segmentation, predictive modelling and online recommendation systems. In 2011, she has launched her first startup, Jeenuin Inc. in Silicon Valley, to develop a sentiment analysis software. In 2018, she co-founded Cherrydata in Milan, Italy.