EP25 – Data Scientist : Jeffrey Hammerbacher

Hello People,

Here is the thirteenth article of my series concerning famous Data Scientists. We will be focused on Data Scientist who turned Entrepreneur. Today we will talk about Jeffrey Hammerbacher, A.K.A Jeff, A.K.A Data God according to Fast Company. From Wall Street to Facebook Data Team lead to Co-founder of Cloudera.

So we will follow the following steps.

(1) Who is this Data Scientist?

(2) What is his work & Entrepreneur project are about?

(3) How can I benefit of such learning insights in my career path & theme selection?

Who is this Data Scientist?

Can’t be more precise than his bio on HammerLab. So here you go, Jeffrey Hammerbacher is an Assistant Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Medical University of South Carolina. At Mount Sinai he is a member of the Immunology and Icahn Institutes. He is a founder and the Chief Scientist of Cloudera, an angel investor with his wife Halle Tecco at Techammer, and serves on the board of CIOX and Sage Bionetworks. Jeff was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Partners immediately prior to founding Cloudera. He joined Accel from Facebook, where he conceived, built, and led the Data team. Before joining Facebook, Jeff was a quantitative analyst on Wall Street after earning his Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics from Harvard University. BOOM!

What is his work about?

Hammerbacher, is a Number Crusher. Starting his work as an analyst at Wall Street; he turned to the big data world when joining Facebook. Meanwhile, he was named assistant professor at Icahn School of Medicine because, the school has begun an ambitious, well-funded initiative to apply data science to medicine.

His contributions are mostly related to  the applications of statistics and machine learning. At Facebook he worked on building out the infrastructure to support these tasks for massive data sets. Hammerbacher also leads a team in the conception of two open source projects: Hive (a system for offline analysis built above Hadoop) and Cassandra (a structured storage system on a P2P network).

Being labelled as the Data God due to this infamous quote below; he soon re-engineered his working position to Cloudera after Facebook as he thinks that product and engineering talents being employed in masses by companies such as Google and Facebook to work on advertising-related algorithms is not worth it.

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” – Jeffrey Hammerbacher

This leading the latter to co-founding of Cloudera after he got bored of the simplistic use of great minds over data analysis.

Cloudera: Founded in 2008 by some of the brightest minds at Silicon Valley’s leading companies—including Google (Christophe Bisciglia), Yahoo! (Amr Awadallah), Oracle (Mike Olson), and Facebook (Jeff Hammerbacher). Doug Cutting, co-creator of Hadoop, joined the company in 2009 as Chief Architect and remains in that role. Today, Cloudera has over 1,600 employees across the globe–each one with their own hoodie. The company performs machine learning and advanced analytics following a Hybrid Open Source Software business model.

How can I benefit of such learning insights in my career path & theme selection?

Hammerbacher is really a Data God / Data Scientist for his contributions in thinking outside the box while not leaving his analytical skills to increase likes on a page. He is concerned about problem solving and related business analytics to enhance the use of data. The fact that he left Facebook to follow his ideals are really inspirational. He even published a book named Beautiful Data showing how he conceived the data and the related analysis & use of it.

Verdict ! Role Model indeed. For his goals and determination, in order to do what he wishes to accomplish instead of “Squandering” his skills – he is sure a role model to be.  In addition, being a major in Maths, he got critical thinking more related to the data itself instead on being focused about the tools or the human brain perfect copy. Indeed he makes use of Hadoop or related software but his aim is more about bringing value to data rather than focusing on frivolities related to it. In addition, the honorifics he got really get me envious of such success. Damn ! Being labelled as Data God or Mr.Data; is the heck of an accomplishment in the mastering Data. Thus, he does  fit as a role model for me on my DoctoRoad.

-L-