In a career spanning academia, technology, and finance, Dr. Usama Fayyad has led Data for NASA, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Barclays, and charted the way forward to unlock the precious value of the Data that surrounds us.

Usama is the founder/CEO of Open Insights which he founded in 2008. From 2013-2016 he was Global Chief Data Officer & Group Managing Director at Barclays where he also took on an additional role as CIO of Risk, Finance & Treasury Technology in 2015. After Barclays, he served as Interim CTO (10/16-4/17) for Stella.AI a Mountain View, CA – a VC-Funded startup in AI for HR/recruiting and also as Interim Chief Operations & Technology Officer for MTN’s new division: MTN2.0 aiming to extend Africa’s largest telco into new revenue streams beyond Voice & Data and into payments, lending, savings, and MFS and Data-as-a-Service businesses.

From 2010-2013 Usama was the co-founder of OASIS-500, a tech startup investment fund, following his appointment as Founding Executive Chairman in 2010 by King Abdullah II of Jordan. Up until joining Barclays in 2013, he was also Chairman, Co-Founder, and Chief Technology Officer of Blue Kangaroo Corp building a mobile search engine service for offers personalization and activation and AI Chatbots for shopping activation with large retailers based in Silicon Valley.

In 2008, Usama founded Open Insights, a Seattle-based Data strategy, technology, and strategic consulting firm that helps enterprises deploy Data-driven solutions to grow revenue from Data assets. The company also provides services and products in open source BigData and AI/ML/Data Science solutions. In 2004 Yahoo! acquired Usama’s second startup (DMX Group which he started in Seattle in 2003) and he became Yahoo!’s Chief Data Officer and Executive Vice President of Research and Strategic Data Solutions where he ran Yahoo!’s global Data strategy, architecting its Data policies and systems, and managing its Data analytics and Data processing infrastructure. The Data teams he built at Yahoo! collected, managed, and processed over 25 terabytes of Data per day, and drove a major part of ad targeting revenue and Data insights businesses globally. He was the first person in the world to hold the CDO title. He also founded Yahoo! Research Labs where much of the early work on BigData made it to open source and established the early collaborations that launched Hadoop and other open-source contributions. In 2000 Usama left his leadership position at Microsoft to co-find and serve as Chairman and CEO Audience Science (digiMine, Inc.) a VC-funded company building hosted analytics and machine learning solutions for Fortune 500 companies. At Microsoft, he spent 5 years leading the Data mining and exploration group at Microsoft Research and headed the Data mining products group for Microsoft’s server division. From 1989 to 1996 Usama held a leadership role at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where he founded JPL’s Machine Learning Systems Group. His work on applying machine learning to the analysis of massive science databases garnered him the Lew Allen Award for Excellence in Research from Caltech, as well as a U.S. Government medal from NASA.

Usama has published over 100 technical articles on Data mining, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and databases. He holds over 30 patents, is a Fellow of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). He has edited two influential books on Data mining and served as editor-in-chief on two key industry journals. He also served on the boards or advisory boards of several private and public companies including Criteo, Invensense, RapidMiner, Stella.AI, Virsec, Silniva, Abe.AI, NetSeer, Choicestream, and others. On the academic front, he is on advisory boards of the Data Science Institute at Imperial College, AAI at UTS, and The University of Michigan College of Engineering.

Usama earned his Ph.D. in engineering in AI/Machine Learning from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He holds two BSE’s in Engineering, MSE Computer Engineering and M.Sc. in Mathematics. He is active in the academic community with several adjunct professor posts and is the only person to receive both the ACM’s SIGKDD Innovation Award (2007) and Service Award (2003). He is an active angel investor and advisor in many early-stage tech startups across the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East.