About

Todd Wasson is a highly skilled and experienced machine learning researcher and engineer, statistician, and interdisciplinary scientist with over 14 years of relevant experience. He is currently working as a Machine Learning Research Scientist at Netflix, where he is focused on personalizing the construction of the Netflix landing page to yield a tailored interface for anyone to find engaging content according to their individual interests. Todd has led projects and teams developing statistical inference that scales, learning probabilistic models of complex phenomena, and deploying these in production in contexts across industry and scientific domains, most recently with a particular emphasis on recommender systems. He is well-versed in various applications of deep learning and related neural net approaches for multimodal modeling and prediction, and has leveraged neural networks for content understanding in the feed, producing the first-ever online neural network feed model at LinkedIn. Prior to joining Netflix, Todd worked as a Machine Learning Engineer at LinkedIn, where he was part of the AI organization and focused on various applications of deep learning and related neural net approaches for multimodal modeling and prediction. He also worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he served as a Data Scientist and Machine Learning Group Leader in the Computational Engineering Division. In this role, he focused on the derivation and application of machine learning and statistical modeling techniques to a variety of scientific domains ranging from cyber security to biomedicine, as well as the development of high performance software to implement these solutions, often built on scalable computing frameworks including Apache Spark and Apache Storm. He oversaw a group of eight PhD Data Scientists and opened new scientific domains and research areas to the benefits of scalable statistics and data science at LLNL. Todd holds a Ph.D. in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics from Duke University and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of South Florida. He is well-versed in various technologies and tools, including Research Scientist, ML, AI, Neural Networks, Data Scientist, Deep Learning, Apache storm, and Spark. Todd is a highly motivated and dedicated individual with strong technical and management skills, and a proven track record of delivering successful projects and leading teams to success.