Organizers

Mihajlo Grbovic, Ph.D. is a Senior Machine Learning Scientist on the Search Ranking Team at Airbnb. Prior to that, he was a Senior Research Manager at Yahoo Labs working on Advertising Sciences. He has more than 10 years of technical experience in applied Machine Learning, acting as a Science Lead in a portfolio of advertising technology projects on Monetization of Tumblr, Yahoo Email and Yahoo Search. Some of his biggest accomplishments include building a large scale Interest and Gender Targeting Pipeline for Tumblr, training Email Classifiers used in Yahoo Mail Smart Views that millions of people interact with every day, and introducing the next generation query-ad matching algorithm to Yahoo Sponsored Search. Dr. Grbovic published more than 40 peer-reviewed publications at top Machine Learning and Web Science Conferences and co-authored more than 10 pending patents. His work was featured in Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, MIT Technology Review, Popular Science and Market Watch.

Thanasis Noulas, thanasis.noulas@airbnb.com, is a Senior Research Scientist in Airbnb's Market Dynamics team, focusing on Mechanism Design, Pricing and paid Growth initiative. He holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam focusing on audio & video processing, and his previous experience includes Algorithmic Trading for Source Capital, Recommender Systems, Pricing and Ranking at Booking.com and Data Science Management of the Expansion products at Uber.