Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Jeremy Howard, President and Chief Scientist of Kaggle (Part 1)

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Jeremy Howard is president and chief scientist at Kaggle, and sits on the faculty at Singularity University. Previously, he founded FastMail (sold to Opera Software) and Optimal Decisions (sold to ChoicePoint, now called LexisNexis Risk Solutions). Prior to that he worked in management consulting, at McKinsey & Company and A.T. Kearney.

Jeremy’s passion is applying algorithms to data. Kaggle is the world’s largest community of data scientists – more than 75,000 at last count. Kaggle’s data scientists have solved some of the toughest problems for some of the world’s smartest organizations, including NASA, Merck, Ford, Allstate, and Wikipedia. At Singularity University, Jeremy teaches data science to the elite group of students who are awarded places to the graduate program.

At FastMail he used algorithms to automate nearly every part of the business – as a result the company only needed a total of three full-time staff, and got over a million signups. Optimal Decisions was a business built to commercialize a new algorithm he designed for the optimal pricing of insurance.

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