Usama Fayyad keynote speaker

Usama M. Fayyad is Chairman of Open Insights, an AI and Data technology and consulting firm he founded in 2008 after leaving Yahoo! to help enterprises deploy Data-driven solutions to grow revenue from AI and data assets. He is also SVP for AI & Data Strategy, Sr. Advisor to the President, and the Inaugural Director of the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University where he is a professor of the practice at Khoury College of Computer Sciences. Usama became the first person to hold the Chief Data Officer title when Yahoo! acquired his second startup after leaving Microsoft. As Yahoo!’s CDO & EVP of Strategic Data Solutions he also founded and led Yahoo Research Labs to become one the of the top research institutions focused on the sciences underlying the Internet.

Fayyad’s previous roles include Global Chief Data Officer at Barclays Bank where he also took on the role of CIO of Finance, Risk, & Treasury Technology. He is Founding Executive Chairman at Oasis500 and an early stage technology accelerator in the Middle East. He served as co-founder & CTO of OODA Health, held leadership roles at Microsoft and founded the Machine Learning Systems group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where his work on machine learning garnered him the top Excellence in Research award from Caltech and a U.S. Government medal from NASA.

Fayyad earned his Ph.D. in engineering in AI/Machine Learning from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and holds two Bachelor of Science in Engineering degrees in EE and CE, MSE Computer Engineering and M.Sc. in Mathematics. Fayyad has published over 100 technical articles on data mining, data science, AI/ML, and databases. He holds over 20 patents and is a Fellow of both the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He has edited two influential books on data mining/data science and served as Founding Editor-in-Chief on two key journals in the field.