The speaker, Martin Gerlach, is a senior research scientist at the Wikimedia Foundation. He discusses how his team has been building open tools to support research around Wikimedia projects, specifically targeting three areas: addressing knowledge gaps, improving knowledge integrity, and growing the research community. He presents examples of clean and pre-processed data sets, tools for data processing, and building machine learning APIs. He also highlights potential ways for developers and researchers to contribute, including joining the research community at Wiki Workshop.