Michele (pirroh) Catasta pirroh

👋 Hi there, I'm Michele (pirroh) Catasta

👨‍💻 AI Research Scientist @ X, the moonshot factory (formerly Google[x])

👨‍🏫 Former Research Scientist and Instructor in Machine Learning @ Stanford University

🔭 Expertise: Machine Learning (on Graphs and Source Code), Data Science, Semantic Search, Human Computation

🎓 Education

Postdoc in Machine Learning at Stanford University
- Advised by Prof. Jure Leskovec
- Affiliated with SNAP and Statistical Machine Learning Group
PhD in Computer Science at EPFL

👨‍💻 Experience

Research Scientist at Stanford University and at EPFL
- Contributed to several projects (funded by IARPA, DARPA, Samsung, Google, Amazon, ...) with a focus on Machine Learning (GNNs, Transformers, Open Graph Benchmark, etc.), Recommender Systems, Crowdsourcing, and Data Science.
Intern at MIT Media Lab (w/ Prof. Alex 'Sandy' Pentland), Yahoo Research (w/ Prof. Ricardo Baeza-Yates), and Google.
Founding member of Sindice.com, the largest Semantic Web Search Engine (back in the days). The core technologies developed for Sindice evolved into:
- a top-level Apache project, Any23
- several contributions to Hadoop, Lucene and Solr
- Siren, an investigative intelligence platform which secured $15M+ in funding -- kudos to my amazing ex-colleagues 👍

👨‍🏫 Teaching

At Stanford University:
- CS224W: Machine Learning with Graphs -- Co-instructor together with Prof. Jure Leskovec
- CS246: Mining Massive Data Sets -- Co-instructor together with Prof. Jure Leskovec
- CS329S: Machine Learning Systems Design -- Advisor
- CS341: Project in Mining Massive Data Sets -- Instructor
At EPFL:
- Applied Data Analysis -- Created and taught the first edition of the course
  - ADA is now taught by my friend and research collaborator Prof. Robert West (head of the Data Science Lab), who masterfully improved the course in several areas
  - 2nd largest course offered by the CS department at EPFL, recently grown to ~400 students -- kudos to Bob 👍