Cassie Kozyrkov is a South African

data scientist Data science is an interdisciplinary field that uses scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to extract or extrapolate knowledge and insights from noisy, structured and unstructured data, and apply knowledge from data across a bro ...

and

statistician A statistician is a person who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors. It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects, and statisticians may wor ...

. She worked at Google in Developer Relations team and with

Decision Intelligence Decision intelligence is an engineering discipline that augments data science with theory from social science, decision theory, and managerial science. Its application provides a framework for best practices in organizational decision-making ...

Early life and education

Kozyrkov grew up in South Africa and moved to the US in her teens. As a child, Kozyrkov became interested in data when she discovered spreadsheet software and later became interested in the relationship between information and

decision-making In psychology, decision-making (also spelled decision making and decisionmaking) is regarded as the Cognition, cognitive process resulting in the selection of a belief or a course of action among several possible alternative options. It could be ...

. She began her studies in economics and mathematical statistics at

Nelson Mandela University Nelson Mandela University (formerly known as ''Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU)'' ) and before that - the University of Port Elizabeth (UPE), the Port Elizabeth Technikon and Vista University's Port Elizabeth campus. This South Afr ...

at the age of fifteen, and transferred to the University of Chicago to complete her undergraduate degree. After graduation, Kozyrkov worked as a

researcher assistant Research is "creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge". It involves the collection, organization and analysis of evidence to increase understanding of a topic, characterized by a particular attentiveness t ...

at the University of Chicago Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, then enrolled in, but did not complete, graduate studies at

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

in psychology and cognitive neuroscience with a focus on neuroeconomics. Her research involved the neural processing of value and economic preferences.

Career

Kozyrkov joined Google as a statistician in the Research and Machine Intelligence division in 2014. She originally worked for Google in Mountain View, before moving to New York City a few months later. After two years, she joined the Office of the CTO at Google in 2016 and later to Developer Relation Team in 2017. Her area of focus at Google is on applied AI and data science process architecture. Kozyrkov is also a

technology evangelist A technology evangelist is a person who builds a critical mass of support for a given technology, and then establishes it as a technical standard in a market that is subject to network effects. The word ''evangelism'' is borrowed from the context ...

and has been called a data science

thought leader A thought leader has been described as an individual or firm recognized as an authority in a specific field and also as business jargon. Meanings Go-to expert From the perspective of a thought leader as the 'go-to expert', being a thought leader ...

. She has been a keynote speaker at large conference

, including

Web Summit Web Summit is an annual technology conference held in Lisbon, Portugal. Founded in 2009 by Paddy Cosgrave, David Kelly, and Daire Hickey, Web Summit was originally held in Dublin, Ireland until 2016, when it moved permanently to Lisbon. Web S ...

, the world's largest technology event.DW - Lisbon hosts Web Summit: the Davos of the tech world
/ref> Her writing has been featured on '' Harvard Business Review'' and Forbes.

References

External links

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Cassie Kozyrkov
on Medium {{DEFAULTSORT:Kozyrkov, Cassie Living people Year of birth missing (living people) South African women computer scientists Google people People from Gqeberha Duke University alumni Nelson Mandela University alumni University of Chicago alumni