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:

Led Relevance and Experimentation at Airbnb, which delivered 6%+ improvements to booking conversion, worth hundreds of millions of dollars of annual incremental revenues.
Led a team of about 110 data scientists and developers at Microsoft's Analysis and Experimentation.
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.
Received the Individual Lifetime Achievement Award for Experimentation Culture in Sept 2020.
The Harvard Business Review article (10/2017) The Surprising Power of Online Experiments describes much of my work on experimentation.
Investor in Split, an A/B testing company.
While I have been working in industry since 1995, I continue to publish sporadically. My h-index, a measure of productivity and impact of published work, is 60 according to Google Scholar, with over 55,000 citations to my work. Hirsch, who proposed the metric, suggested that an h-index of 10-12 is considered a useful guideline for tenure decisions at major research universities; a value of about 18 could mean a full professorship; 15-20 could mean a fellowship in the American Physical Society.
Some of my talks are available here.
Three of my papers are in the top 1,000 most cited articles in computer science, including the article Wrappers for Feature Subset Selection, which is in the top 300.
I was granted fifteen patents.
MineSet had powerful visualizations of models. Some examples (use quicktime) include: Evidence visualizer (Naive Bayes), Decision Table visualizer, Decision Tree visualizer and powerful data visualizations including: Scatter visualizer and Splat visualizer.
I started the MLC++ project, Machine Learning library in C++, which formed the basis for SGI's MineSet, then Blue Martini's analytics. Documentation includes C++ coding standards, MLC++ coding standards, and utilities.
Keynote at EC 10. A similar keynote at the Analytics Revolution, 2010 was recorded: Online Controlled Experiments: Listening to the Customers, not to the HiPPO (PDF) (PPTX) (video)
The paper Online Experimentation at Microsoft, 2009, was recognized as top 30 Microsoft ThinkWeek paper and an early version of it won 3^rd place at the Third workshop on Data Mining Case Studies and Practice Prize, 2009.
Scientific Advisor to Trusted Opinion, 2007-2008.
Member of Technical Advisory Board, mySimon, 1999-2000 (until they were bought by CNET).
General Chair, KDD 2004.

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