Reza Zadeh ( Persian: رضا زاده) is an American-Canadian-Iranian computer scientist and technology executive working on machine learning. He is adjunct professor at Stanford University and CEO of Matroid. ^{[1] [2]} He has served on the technical advisory boards of Databricks and Microsoft. ^[3] His work focuses on machine learning, distributed computing, and discrete applied mathematics. ^{[4] [5] [6]}

In Industry, to evaluate new ventures formed at the University of Toronto, Reza serves as a chief scientist of Machine Learning ^[7] at the Rotman School of Management. ^[8] His awards include a KDD Best Paper Award ^[9] and the Gene Golub Outstanding Thesis Award at Stanford.

Work

Computer Vision

The Princeton University ModelNet challenge is an object recognition competition to classify 3D Computer-aided design models into object categories. In 2016, Matroid was a leader in this competition and the relevant neural networks were integrated into the Matroid product. ^[10]

In a collaboration with his own doctor at Stanford hospital, Reza's research team created a neural network to automatically detect Glaucoma in 3D optical coherence tomography images of the eyeball. The net surpassed human doctor performance and is providing diagnostic hints at the hospital. ^[11]

In 2016, Reza founded Matroid, inc to commercialize computer vision research by building a product for industries such as manufacturing and industrial sensors. Matroid raised $13.5 million from New Enterprise Associates, Intel, and others.

Distributed Machine Learning

Reza is a coauthor of Apache Spark, in particular its Machine Learning library, MLlib. ^{[12] [13]} Through open source, Reza's work has been incorporated into industrial and academic cluster computing environments. ^[14] He was an early technical advisor and employee at Databricks, the company commercializing Spark.

Recommender Systems

Reza created the machine learning algorithm behind Twitter's Who-To-Follow project ^[15] and subsequently released it to open source. ^[16] During that time he also led research tracking earthquake damage via machine learning, gaining wide media attention as an example of real-time social information flow. ^{[17] [18] [19]}

Personal

Reza was born during the Iran–Iraq War in the under-siege city of Ahvaz. From there, his family emigrated to London, England where Reza grew up until age 17, after which he emigrated to Toronto, Canada, obtaining a degree from University of Waterloo. He frequently visited the US at age 18 to work on the Google Research team, and later moved to the US for a master's degree at Carnegie Mellon University and PhD at Stanford, all in Computer Science and Mathematics.

He holds three citizenships: Canadian, American, and Iranian. During confusion surrounding the 2017 travel ban, his pro-immigration stance stood as voice of protest to the Trump Administration's Anti-Immigration policies. ^[20]

References

External links

• Chinese translation of his PhD Dissertation by Xu Wenhao, November 2012
• Website at Stanford