Ron Kohavi, PhD

I am consulting and teaching now, as I look for my next full-time job. I was Vice President and Technical Fellow at Airbnb, working on search relevance, personalization, and experimentation. I previously led the Analysis and Experimentation at Microsoft's Cloud and AI group as Technical Fellow and Corporate Vice President, and I was previously the director of data mining and personalization at Amazon.com, and VP of Business Intelligence at Blue Martini Software.

Check out my Linkedin profile , resume, publications, talks, and experimentation-related talks.

Highlights:



Short Bio

Ron (Ronny) Kohavi is now consulting and teaching. He was Vice President and Technical Fellow at Airbnb until 3/2021. He was previously a Microsoft Technical Fellow and corporate VP at Microsoft's Cloud and AI group. He joined Microsoft in 2005 and founded the Experimentation Platform team in 2006. Prior to Microsoft, he was the director of data mining and personalization at Amazon.com, and the Vice President of Business Intelligence at Blue Martini Software, which went public in 2000, and later acquired by Red Prairie. Prior to joining Blue Martini, Kohavi managed MineSet project, Silicon Graphics' award-winning product for data mining and visualization. He joined Silicon Graphics after getting a Ph.D. in Machine Learning from Stanford University, where he led the MLC++ project, the Machine Learning library in C++ used in MineSet and at Blue Martini Software. Kohavi received his BA from the Technion, Israel. He was the General Chair for KDD 2004, co-chair of KDD 99's industrial track with Jim Gray, and co-chair of the KDD Cup 2000 with Carla Brodley. He was an invited speaker at the National Academy of Engineering in 2000, a keynote speaker at PAKDD 2001, an invited speaker at KDD 2001's industrial track, a keynote speaker at EC 10 (2010), a keynote speaker at Recsys 2012, a keynote speaker at Emetrics 2014, a keynote speaker at KDD 2015, and and a keynote speaker at Conversion Hotel 2017. He was an invited speaker or panelist at all eight MIT Code conferences (Conference On Digital Experimentation) in 2014-2021. His papers have over 55,000 citations and three of his papers are in the top 1,000 most-cited papers in Computer Science. In 2016, he was named the 5th most influential scholar in AI and the 26th most influential scholar in Machine Learning. He received the Individual Lifetime Achievement Award for Experimentation Culture in Sept 2020. He co-authored the book Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments: A Practical Guide to A/B Testing with Diane Tang and Ya Xu. The book was translated to Chinese and Japanese, with Korean translation in the works.

ronnyk@ live dot com