Reza Zadeh is an American-Canadian-Iranian computer scientist and technology executive working on

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

. He is adjunct professor at Stanford University and CEO of

Matroid In combinatorics, a branch of mathematics, a matroid is a structure that abstracts and generalizes the notion of linear independence in vector spaces. There are many equivalent ways to define a matroid axiomatically, the most significant being ...

. He has served on the technical advisory boards of Databricks and

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

. His work focuses on machine learning,

distributed computing A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed computing is a field of computer sci ...

, and discrete

applied mathematics Applied mathematics is the application of mathematical methods by different fields such as physics, engineering, medicine, biology, finance, business, computer science, and industry. Thus, applied mathematics is a combination of mathemat ...

. In Industry, to evaluate new ventures formed at the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institu ...

, Reza serves as a chief scientist of Machine Learning at the

Rotman School of Management The Joseph L. Rotman School of Management (commonly known as the Rotman School of Management, the Rotman School or just Rotman) is the University of Toronto's graduate business school, located in Downtown Toronto. The University of Toronto has be ...

. His awards include a KDD Best Paper Award and the Gene Golub Outstanding Thesis Award at

Stanford Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

Work

Computer Vision

The

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the n ...

ModelNet challenge is an object recognition competition to classify 3D Computer-aided design models into object categories. In 2016,

was a leader in this competition and the relevant neural networks were integrated into the Matroid product. In a collaboration with his own doctor at

Stanford hospital Stanford University Medical Center is a medical complex which includes Stanford Health Care and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, Stanford Children's Health. It is consistently ranked as one of the best hospitals in the United States and serv ...

, Reza's research team created a neural network to automatically detect

Glaucoma Glaucoma is a group of eye diseases that result in damage to the optic nerve (or retina) and cause vision loss. The most common type is open-angle (wide angle, chronic simple) glaucoma, in which the drainage angle for fluid within the eye re ...

in 3D optical coherence tomography images of the eyeball. The net surpassed human doctor performance and is providing diagnostic hints at the hospital. In 2016, Reza founded Matroid, inc to commercialize

computer vision Computer vision is an Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate t ...

research by building a product for industries such as

manufacturing Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to a ...

and industrial sensors. Matroid raised $13.5 million from New Enterprise Associates,

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the devel ...

, and others.

Distributed Machine Learning

Reza is a coauthor of

Apache Spark Apache Spark is an open-source unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing. Spark provides an interface for programming clusters with implicit data parallelism and fault tolerance. Originally developed at the University of Califor ...

, in particular its Machine Learning library, MLlib,. Through open source, Reza's work has been incorporated into industrial and academic cluster computing environments. He was an early technical advisor and employee at Databricks, the company commercializing Spark.

Recommender Systems

Reza created the machine learning algorithm behind

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

's Who-To-Follow projectPankaj Gupta, Ashish Goel, Jimmy Lin, Aneesh Sharma, Dong Wang, and Reza Bosagh Zade
WTF:The who-to-follow system at Twitter
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on World Wide Web and subsequently released it to

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

. 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.

Personal

Reza was born during the

Iran–Iraq War The Iran–Iraq War was an armed conflict between Iran and Iraq that lasted from September 1980 to August 1988. It began with the Iraqi invasion of Iran and lasted for almost eight years, until the acceptance of United Nations Security Counci ...

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 The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to "Uptown" Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also operates ...

. 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 Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

and PhD at

, 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.

References

External links

Chinese translation of his PhD Dissertation
by Xu Wenhao, November 2012
Website
at Stanford {{DEFAULTSORT:Zadeh, Reza Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Stanford University alumni University of Waterloo alumni Canadian computer scientists Iranian expatriate academics