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Usama Fayyad

Chairman and CEO at Open Insights

About me

Usama joined Northeastern University Khoury College of Computer Science as Professor of the Practice, and the Office of the Provost as the Inaugural Executive Director of the Institute for Experiential AI. He continues as Chairman of Open Insights, a company he founded as a technology and consulting firm in 2008 after leaving Yahoo! to enable enterprises to get value out of their data assets and optimize or create new business models based on the new evolving economy of interactions. Leveraging open source, bigData technology, and strategic consulting Open Insights deploys data-driven solutions to grow revenue from Data assets through BigData strategy, new business models on data assets, and deploying data science, AI/ML solutions. Usama recently served (2017-2019) as Co-Founder & CTO at OODA Health, Inc a VC-funded company aiming to liberate the healthcare system from administrative waste by leveraging AI/automation to create real-time/retail-like experience in payments in healthcare.

From 2013-2016 Usama served as Global Chief Data Officer & Group Managing Director at Barclays Bank in London, after launching the largest tech startup accelerator in MENA following his appointment as Executive Chairman of Oasis500 in Jordan by King Abdullah II in 2010. His background includes Chairman & CEO roles at several startups, including Blue Kangaroo Corp, DMX Group and digiMine Inc.

He was the first person to hold the Chief Data Officer title when Yahoo! acquired his second startup in 2004. At Yahoo! he built the Strategic Data Solutions group and founded Yahoo! Research Labs where much of the early work on BigData made it to open source and led to Hadoop and other opensource contributions. He has held leadership roles at Microsoft (1996-2000) and founded the Machine Learning Systems group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (1989-2005), where his work on machine learning resulted in the top Excellence in Research award from Caltech, and a U.S. Government medal from NASA.

Usama has published over 100 technical articles on data mining, data science, AI/ML, and databases. He holds over 20 patents and is a Fellow of both the AAAI and the ACM. Usama earned his Ph.D. in Engineering in AI/Machine Learning from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has edited two influential books on data mining/data science and served as Founding Editor-in-Chief on two key journals. He also served on the boards/advisory boards of private and public companies including: Criteo, Invensense, Exelate, RapidMiner, Stella.AI, Virsec, Silniva, Abe.AI, NetSeer, Choicestream, Medio, Leapyear Technology, Drover, and others. He served on the advisory boards of the Data Science Institute at Imperial College, AAI at UTS, and The University of Michigan College of Engineering National Advisory Board. He serves on the Board Advisory Committee to Nationwide Building Society in the UK and on the Advisory board of the WEF Global Center for Cybersecurity. He is an active angel investor/advisor in many early-stage tech startups across the U.S., Europe and the Middle East.