Michael L. Best

Michael L. Best
Dr. Micahel L. Best.
Residence	Atlanta, Georgia
Nationality	American
Fields	Computer Science, ICT4D, ICT sustainibility,
Institutions	Georgia Tech,
Alma mater	MIT Media Lab,
Doctoral advisor	Pattie Maes

Michael L. Best is an American computer scientist and international development specialist serving as the first director of the United Nations University Institute on Computing and Society established in 2015. He is associate professor (on sabbatical leave) at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he holds a joint appointment with the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Interactive Computing.

Working in the areas of ICT4D, he is co-founder and editor-in-chief emeritus of journal Information Technologies and International Development and leads the "Global Computing" column for Communications of the ACM. He has published on various topics such as formative work in ICT sustainability, rural access, and ICTs for peacebuilding in conflict stressed environments.

His work has done much to promote ICT4D as an academic discipline having founded the area’s most significant journal (ITID) and helped to lead its largest conference (ICTD).

Best was born in Los Angeles, California. He attended UCLA for undergraduate studies in computer science and engineering, where for his senior thesis he developed, on a Connection Machine, a massively parallel algorithm for the graph coloring problem. After graduating with a BS in 1989 he joined Thinking Machines Corp in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked on various projects, including parallel programming languages, message passing I/O, and network simulation for the CM 5 supercomputer.