My Greatest Accomplishment: The most exciting project of my career so far has been getting to design the algorithms behind Thumbprint Radio for Pandora, where I worked before joining Netflix in January. Thumbprint is Pandora’s No. 1 most-listened-to station. In total over 46 million listeners have tuned in for nearly 34 billion tracks.
How Drexel Helped: I am extremely grateful for my experience working for Professor Youngmoo Kim in the College of Engineering. Through his mentorship and my time in his lab I grew my knowledge in signal processing, machine learning and music information retrieval. I also had the opportunity to publish my work at international conferences, yielding valuable feedback and insights from some of the best researchers in my field.
Where I’ll Be in Five Years: I’m relatively new to Netflix so my current goals are focused entirely on what I can do to help advance the state of the art of their recommendation infrastructure.
“If I live to be 100, the change I’d most like to see in the world is…
a massive reduction in climate change trajectory. We need massive global action to reduce carbon emissions and investment in renewable energy technology.” — Erik Schmidt