My career goal is to make machine learning and AI more useful to more people. To that end, I am the Director of Engineering for Data Science and AI in Microsoft. My team builds the Data Science, AI and many of the Copilot experiences in Fabric. Prior to my current role, I led the team which launched ML.NET into Open Source. ML.NET is Microsoft’s machine learning toolkit. I also started and open sourced what is now known as Apache REEF.

Besides my role at Microsoft, I am also a member of the Apache Software Foundation and was the inaugural PMC chair (VP) of Apache REEF.

Software contributions

  • Microsoft ML.NET: Machine learning for .NET developers. Open Source and cross platform.
  • Apache REEF: A standard library for writing high performance applications on Big Data clusters.
  • ScalOps A domain specific language for distributed, larger scale data analytics and machine learning.
  • DIOS: A large scale machine learning library used at Yahoo!
  • CofiRank: A collaborative filtering algorithm that supports predicting the ranking of items as opposed to mere rating.
  • BMRM: Open source, modular and scalable convex solver for many machine learning problems cast in the form of regularized risk minimization problem.
  • Elefant: A machine learning toolbox. My contributions include a bridge that renders UIMA annotators into feature extraction tools for machine learning. This code is Open Source under the Mozilla Public License.
  • DkPro: A set of UIMA annotators developed at TU Darmstadt.

Awards

Academic Service

  • 2019: PC Member ICML 2019, SIGMOD 2019, SysML 2019
  • 2018: PC Member of SysML 2018
  • 2017: Demonstrations and Competitions Chair for NIPS 2017
  • 2016: Co-Chair for KDD Cup 2016. Reviewer / PC Member: HotCloud, USENIX ATC, VLDB
  • 2015 Organizer of Learning Systems 2015. Reviewer / PC Member: NIPS, KDD
  • 2014: PC Member: KDD, ACM Recommender Systems, NIPS
  • 2013: PC Member CIKM 2013, ACM RecSys 2013, SIGMOD 2013, NIPS 2013, SOCC 2013; Tutorials on large scale machine learning at ICDE and SIGMOD
  • 2012: New Templates for Scalable Data Analysis Tutoria at WWW 2012; PC-Member KDD, ICML, Hadoop Summit 2012
  • 2011: Organizer KDD Cup; PC-Member: KDD, HetRec, BigLearn, CMPL, AISTATS, ICANN
  • 2010: Organized HetRec 2010; PCMember: NIPS, ACM Recommender Systems, ICML, AISTATS, ECML/PKDD, MLOSS ‘10, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE) and the Special Issue of the Journal of Web Semantics on “Bridging the Gap” – Data Mining and Social Network Analysis for Integrating Semantic Web and Web 2.0
  • 2009: Organized iatel09; PC Member: Deutsche KI-Konferenz, KDD, ECML/PKDD, Workshop on Social Information Retrieval for Technology-Enhanced Learning (SIRTEL’08) in the International Conference on Web-based Learning (ICWL) 2009

Student guidance

  • Sergey Dudoladov: Summer intern at Microsoft, 2016
  • Ignacio Cano: Summer intern at Microsoft, 2015
  • Alex Beutel: Summer intern at Microsoft, 2014
  • Arun Kumar: Summer intern at Microsoft, 2013
  • Daniel Glöckner: Collaborative filtering of framework code, Diploma thesis at TUD.
  • Kai Michael Höver: Ranking im Web 2.0. Diplomarbeit an der TU Darmstadt.
  • David Koch: Study of the discrepancy between client- and server side logging of clickstreams. Master’s Thesis at the KTH Stockholm.

Former affiliations

  • Yahoo! Research: My focus there was anti-abuse and web scale machine learning.
  • I obtained my PhD as a student in the graduate school for the improvement of e-learning at the computer science department of the Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. I worked on applications of machine learning in elearning. To do so, I was lucky enough to gather support by two supervisors: Max Mühlhäuser (TUD) and Alex Smola.
  • Yahoo! Labs: Research intern. I worked on email spam filters in the SPARTA project.
  • Statistical Machine Learning Program of NICTA: Visiting Scholar
  • Data Mining Group MINE of Fraunhofer’s Integrated Publication and Information Systems Institute (IPSI): Research associate
  • Centre for Complex Systems and Control (CDSC) at The University of Newcastle, Australia: Visiting Scholar