Invited Speakers
Maria Dimakopoulou, Director of Engineering, Uber
Bio
Maria Dimakopoulou is a leader at the intersection of Machine Learning, Causal Inference and large-scale Engineering Systems in the domains of Recommendation Systems and, more recently, Marketplaces. She is currently Director of Engineering at Uber, where she leads a 50-person organization developing Pricing & Incentive strategies for the Mobility Marketplace. Prior to Uber, Maria Dimakopoulou was Director of Engineering at Spotify, overseeing personalized homepage recommendations for over 650 million listeners across music, podcasts and audiobooks. She also served as Strategy Lead for Spotify’s content discovery efforts. Before Spotify, she was at Netflix, where she drove Causal ML initiatives and later built and led the cross-functional Adaptive Experimentation working group to advance Netflix’s experimentation capabilities. Earlier in her career, she worked at Google Research on large-scale optimization algorithms. Maria Dimakopoulou earned a PhD from Stanford University in Reinforcement Learning and Causal Inference, advised by Benjamin Van Roy and Susan Athey. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including Stanford’s Outstanding Academic Achievement Award, Intel’s Innovation Award, Google’s Anita Borg Memorial Award and Forbes 30 under 30 Greece.