Lukas Biewald (born 1981 in Massachusetts) is an entrepreneur living in San Francisco, California. Biewald was the founder and CEO of Figure Eight Inc. (formerly CrowdFlower) — an Internet company that collects training data for machine learning — which he co-founded in December 2007 with Chris Van Pelt. In 2019, Biewald sold Figure Eight to

Appen Appen is a municipality in the district of Pinneberg, in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. It is situated approximately 3 km west of Pinneberg, and 20 km northwest of Hamburg. It is twinned with the village of Polegate, near Eastbourne ...

for 300 million dollars. In 2018, Biewald founded Weights and Biases, a company that creates developer tools for machine learning.

Background

Prior to co-founding Figure Eight, Biewald was a Senior Scientist and Manager within the Ranking and Management Team at

Powerset In mathematics, the power set (or powerset) of a set is the set of all subsets of , including the empty set and itself. In axiomatic set theory (as developed, for example, in the ZFC axioms), the existence of the power set of any set is postu ...

, a natural language search technology company later acquired by

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

. From 2005 to 2006, Biewald led the Search Relevance Team for

Yahoo! Japan is a Japanese internet company originally formed as a joint venture between the American internet company Yahoo! (later divested by Verizon into Altaba) and the Japanese company SoftBank. It is headquartered at Kioi Tower in the Tokyo Garden Terr ...

, where he focused on using statistical machine learning approaches to improve the web search ranking function for international markets.

Awards and honors

In 2010, he won the Netexplorateur Prize for creating the GiveWork iPhone app, which allows users to perform small tasks that assist refugees and people in developing countries. Later that year, ''Inc. Magazine'' included Biewald and Van Pelt on its list of the Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30. Biewald and Van Pelt launched CrowdFlower as a product of Dolores Labs at TechCrunch50 in 2009, where the company placed as a finalist. He is the author of several academic papers on applications of

crowdsourcing Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digita ...

, as well as a chapter on crowdsourcing gender and age stereotypes in O'Reilly Media's ''Beautiful Data'' that he co-authored with Brendan O'Connor.

Academic life

Biewald holds an MS in Computer Science and a BS in Mathematics from Stanford University. While pursuing his Master's in Computer Science at Stanford University, Biewald won the California Institute of Technology Turing Tournament.

Media appearances

Biewald appeared in an episode of ''Hidden in Plain Sight'' entitled "Deep Learning is Eating the World","Deep Learning is Eating the World"
where he discussed software evolution and the effect of machine learning on humanity.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Biewald, Lukas American technology chief executives Living people 1981 births Stanford University alumni American computer programmers Businesspeople from Boston