About the Techincal reviewers
Luis Cabrera-Cordon is a Program Manager in the Azure Machine Learning Team, where he focuses on the Azure Machine Learning APIs and the new Machine Learning Marketplace. He is passionate about interaction design and creating software development platforms that are accessible and exciting to use. Luis has worked at Microsoft for over 12; before Azure Machine Learning, he was the Program Manager Lead in charge of the Bing Maps development platform and the PM in charge of the Microsoft Surface developer platform (remember the big Surface?). In a previous life, he was a developer on the Windows Mobile team, working on the first managed APIs that shipped in Windows Mobile. Outside of work, Luis enjoys spending time with his family in the Pacific Northwest. He holds a Masters in Software Engineering from the University of Washington.
Jacob Spoelstra is a Director of Data Science at Microsoft, where he leads a group in the Azure Machine Learning organization responsible for both building end-to-end predictive analytics solutions for internal clients and helping partners adopt the platform. He has more than two decades experience in machine learning and predictive analytics, focusing in particular on neural networks.
Prior to Microsoft, Jacob was the global head of R&D at Opera Solutions. Under his watch, the R&D team developed key Opera innovations, including a patented adaptive auto auction pricing solution utilizing Kalman filters, and collaborative filtering techniques to find statistical anomalies in medical bills as a way to detect revenue leakage. He headed up the Opera Solutions team that, as part of “The Ensemble,” ended up “first equals” in the prestigious Netflix data mining competition, beating out over 41,000 other entrants.
Jacob has held analytics leadership positions at FICO, SAS, ID Analytics, and boutique consulting company BasePoint. He holds BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pretoria, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southern California.
He and his wife, Tanya, have two boys, aged 10 and 12. They enjoy camping, hiking, and snow sports. Jacob is a private pilot and is constantly looking for excuses to go flying.
Dr. Yan Zhang joined Microsoft in May 2014 as a Senior Data Scientist, Cloud Machine Learning Data Science. Before joining Microsoft, Hang was a Staff Data Scientist at WalmartLabs leading a team building internal tools for search analytics and business intelligence. He worked for two years in Opera Solutions as a Senior Scientist focusing on machine learning and data science between 2011 and 2013. Before that, Hang worked at Arizona State University for four years in the area of neuro-informatics. Hang holds a Ph.D. degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering, and a M.S. degree in Statistics from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
Dr. Yan Zhang is a senior data scientist in Microsoft Cloud & Enterprise Azure Machine Learning product team. She builds predictive models and generalized data driven solutions on the Cloud machine learning platform. Her recent research includes predictive maintenance in IoT applications, customer segmentation, and text mining. Dr. Zhang received her Ph.D. in data mining. Before joining Microsoft, she was a research faculty at Syracuse University, USA.