Hossein Falaki

Hossein Falaki

I am an experienced software engineer and data scientist constantly looking for new technical challenges at the intersection of computer science and statistics.

Industry

Currently, I am a staff software engineer at Databricks, where I joined in December 2013 as an early engineer. I have had the opportunity to wear different hats including development, product management, data science, and field engineering. I have been presenting my work at leading industry conferences.

As a software engineer, in addition to regular software development responsibilities, I championed and implemented several key features in Databricks product and contributed to Apache Spark. These include integration with third-party visualization libraries, end-to-end implementation of R Notebooks, integration with SparkR, integration with sparklyr, programmable input widgets, and data ingest UI. I also made several contributions to Apache Spark open source project, including the CSV data source.

As a founding member of the data science team, I built our first usage monitoring dashboards using our product, and performed several deep dives and advanced analyses on topics of interest to the executive team.

Past Experiences

I have had the opportunity to work at some of the best technology companies and research labs. Here you can find brief summary of my past work.

Apple

I was a senior data scientist in Apple's Siri group between August 2012 and November 2013. I used statistical analysis and machine learning to improve performance and accuracy of Siri. During my time at Apple I introduced several new tools to the data team workflow including R for advanced analytics and visualization, and Spark for machine learning. I invited creators of Spark from UC Berkeley AMPLab to give technical talks at Apple and encouraged other engineering teams to take advantage of the latest big data stack.

Center for Embedded Network Sensing

I was a graduate researcher at the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) between 2008 and 2012. I worked with Prof. Deborah Estrin, and collaborated with Prof. Ramesh Govindan.

My work involved building mobile systems including smartphone applications and backend systems for data collection and management. I advised several undergraduate students and collaborated with other researchers. I used data to research understand user interaction with smartphone in the context of other mobile projects such as mobile health.

Microsoft Research

I interned at Microsoft Research in Redmond during summer of 2009. I started a new project related to my Ph.D. research at UCLA on understanding smartphone usage using detailed on-device measurements. After the summer I continued my collaboration with my mentor, Ratul Mahajan, as a part-time Microsoft employee throughout 2010. This work lead to two highly cited research papers on Smartphone usage.

Cisco Systems

I spent three months as an intern at Cisco Systems. I developed an application for direct video communication between smartphones on vehicles. The work was used to evaluate the effectiveness of a new software stack for P2P communication.

Industry Talks

I have been presenting my work at several public and private industry conferences and meetups.

Academics

My Ph.D. research was focused on making mobile phones smarter networked devices when they were used in health applications. My Ph.D. dissertation is available here. As a Master's student at the University of Waterloo, I was a member of the Tetherless Computing Lab, where I worked on the KioskNet Project with Prof. S. Keshav. I also studied scanning strategies for opportunistic communication over Wi-Fi on mobile devices.

Education

Academic Publications

My research has been cited more than 1,500 times. For a complete list please visit Google Scholars. Please feel free to contact me regarding my published research.

Research Presentations

Press Coverage

Contact

The best way to contact me is by email: my last name at gmail.com. I read all my messages including recruiting ones. I will respond to all emails from engineers and managers. Recruiters, if I am not responding to you, I am not interested. I also check my LinkedIn inbox from time to time.