Arash Shahsavari

I’m a Senior Data Scientist at Avida Finance, leading the company’s risk modeling efforts. Through statistical modeling, building tooling and systems, and coordinating cross-functional efforts around data and models, I help Avida evaluate credit risk accurately and at scale.

Before Avida, I was a bioinformatician at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute at the University of Cambridge, which means I got to apply machine learning and statistics to cutting-edge biomedical research on a daily basis.

During my time in academia I enjoyed a number of highly inter-disciplinary collaborations which resulted in several peer-reviewed scientific publications.

Furthermore, I am the author and maintainer of the ClustAssess R package, which enables high-resolution evaluation of clustering results.

When I’m not solving real-world problems with ML, I invest in team-building from recruitment through integration: I have developed skills tests for recruitment and interviewed candidates, trained the wider machine learning community, as well as provided long-term supervision and mentoring of junior group members. I am also passionate about education and pedagogy for machine learning and related quantitative skills.

You can reach me on arash[x]@hotmail.com, where [x] should be replaced by the square root of 73599241.