Machine Learning w/ Winton Davies

Winton Davies (http://www.linkedin.com/in/wdavies), a senior member of Google's Technical Staff, will talk with a small group about his career in machine learning, text mining, and natural language processing in the context of early stage startups.

Winton Davies

Davies was of late a principal researcher at Aardvark. Their product, vark.com, is an IM-based Q&A service that specializes in matching users with subject matter experts and recommendations within their social circle.

Between Yahoo and Aardvark Davies had created Contextics.com in order to provide strategic and practical consultancy services based on his last decade's experience in machine learning, text mining and advertising. He is currently a full-time member at Google, and no longer offering those services.

He was a founding member of Yahoo! Research Labs, applying information retrieval, natural language, and machine learning techniques to solve immediate and longer term business goals and problems of the company. Prior to his acquisition by Yahoo he was a Principal Research Engineer at GoTo/Overture, the people who invented the whole field of Bidded Search Advertising. They in turn had acquired the team from Cadabra which was a Comparison Shopping Engine.

He has coded for over 20 years and gained 7 years of experience in traditional software product development at Digital Equipment (now part of HP/Compaq) and acquired 10 years in web-related technology development. In 2001, he received his Doctorate from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. His thesis addressed communication between machine-learning agents. He completed it while working for Professor Mike Genesereth on the Infomaster project at Stanford University.

Specialties: search, bidded search, text matching, comparison shopping, data integration, office software, machine learning.

This event is in collaboration with CodePath (http://thecodepath.com/).