Puya H. Vahabi

Dr. Engineer Puya Vahabi, PhD has been a faculty member at UC Berkeley since 2018, teaching the final course of the Master of Information and Data Science program. His class includes over 100 students each year who work on a diverse range of AI projects and conduct applied research, some of which has recently been published in top conferences like NeurIPS, CIKM, and ICML. With over 10 years of industry experience, Puya specializes in data science and applied AI, with expertise in personalization, search, ranking, relevance, ad optimization, user engagement, recommendation systems, pricing models, and streaming services.Previously, he was a leader in top private and public YCombinator companies: Faire and Airbnb.He served as the Head of Search and Personalization at Faire (Director), where he managed a team of experienced senior staff, principal scientists, and engineers to build world-class end-to-end machine learning solutions. Puya has also held several technical leadership positions in companies such as Airbnb (Tech Lead), Pandora Media (Sr Research Scientist), and Yahoo Research (Scientist). He holds a PhD in Computer Science and engineering and bachelor's and master's degrees in computer engineering. He is a program committee member of the most important computer science conferences: ICLR, ACM CIKM, ACM WSDM, IEEE BIG DATA,  ACM WWW,  Applied Soft Computing Journal, Expert Systems with Applications Journal, etc. He worked for many years as a research associate at the National Research of Italy, and he was a visiting professor at MIT statistic department. 

Additional info: https://www.linkedin.com/in/puyavahabi/ (feel free to say hello!)