Jean-Baptiste Michel graduated as an Engineer of Ecole Polytechnique (Paris, France) in 2005. Since then, he completed an MS in Applied Mathematics and a PhD in Systems Biology at Harvard University. Jean-Baptiste is interested in quantitative aspects of phenomena directly relevant to human life, such as the evolution of disease-causing cells during pathogenesis, violence during conflicts, or the way language and culture change with time. He currently develops a quantitative approach to the study of trends in human languages and cultures based on millions of digitized texts.