ChE Seminar – Dr. Ashish Singhal (Data Science Leader, Facebook)

Host: Dr. Michael Baldea; David Stevens Endowed Lectureship 

ABSTRACT:

“Data Scientist” has been recently termed as one of the most sought after roles in the recent years, not just in the tech sector, but across all industries. Almost every company seeks to best leverage the data they have collected over the years to create better products, services, and many times to simply take better business decisions.

In this presentation, we will take a sneak peek at what means to be a data scientist at Facebook, the world’s largest social network. We will walk through some of the unique challenges that are posed by the sheer volume of data that is available on the FB platform, the demands of the product teams to move fast, and how data scientists balance different tradeoffs to deliver large impact to the ecosystem, and ultimately on our vast user community. We will highlight some tools and processes we’ve developed to help improve our ability to navigate some necessary trade-offs.

BIOGRAPHY:

Ashish Singhal manages two data science teams at Facebook – the first builds products that support content creators monetize on Facebook to build vibrant fan communities and a sustainable businesses. The area focuses on mitigating risk to prevent bad content and bad behaviors receiving monetization support.

He past experience in the tech industry has been in both data scientist and leadership roles at PayPal and Salesforce that included risk, growth, pricing, and user personalization applications. He is a Chemical Engineer by training and has worked in the Building Automation industry and the Chemicals industry in corporate R&D groups for over 10 years. He received his PhD from University of California, Santa Barbara in Chemical Engineering with a focus on Industrial Process Control.