Kamelia Aryafar, Ph.D. is the Head of Retail and Consumer (CPG) Solutions Engineering in Google Cloud AI where she leads applied artificial intelligence and engineering teams focused on solving retailer's problems.
Prior to Google, Dr.Aryafar was the Executive Vice President, Chief Algorithms and Analytics Officer, and board member for Overstock.com. Dr. Kamelia Aryafar led the company’s analytics, data platform, technology, machine learning, data science, data engineering, and algorithmic product functions across the organization. Dr. Aryafar joined Overstock.com, after several years at Etsy where she worked with different product teams across several platforms to integrate analytics, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms throughout the organization.
Dr. Aryafar holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in computer science and ML from Drexel University and has published several papers in scientific journals. As an active member of the ML community, she frequently speaks at academic and industry conferences focusing on advancing the field of AI, ML, Technology and women in STEM. Dr. Aryafar has served on several boards including: Overstock.com, Initiative of Analytics and Data Science Standards (IADSS), Retail Management Institute at Santa Clara University, and Women of MENA in Tech.
Dr. Kamelia Aryafar
AI & Technology Executive
Forbes 30 Inspirational Women 2021
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EXPERIENCE
2020 - Present
Google Inc.
Head of Retail/CPG AI & Engineering
Director of Engineering
2019 - 2020
Overstock.com
Member, Board of Directors
2018 - 2020
Overstock.com
Chief Algorithms and Analytics Officer, EVP
2017 - 2018
Overstock.com
Head of Data Science, Machine Learning, and AI (Engineering and Product)
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2012 - 2017
Etsy
Senior Machine Learning and Data Science Lead
Board Memberships
2021 - Present
Member, Board of Directors,
The JED Foundation
2021 - Present
Dean's Executive Advisory CouncilCCI, Drexel University
2019 - 2020
2019 - Present
Advisory Board Member, Initiative for Analytics & Data Science Standards (IADSS)
Member, Board of Directors, Overstock.com
2019 - Present
Member, Board of Directors, Persian women in tech (non-profit)
Compensation committee member
2019 - Present
Advisory Board Member, Retail Management Institute at Santa Clara University (RMI)
EDUCATION
2018
University of Utah - David Eccles School of Business
Executive Training
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Strategic Leadership
2010-2015
Drexel University
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Computer Science (Machine Learning)
2007-2010
Drexel University
Master of Science (M.Sc.)
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Computer Science
2003 - 2007
Sharif University
Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.)
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Computer Science
SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS
2020
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Silicon Slopes Tech Summit, Salt Lake City, USA
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AI Everything, Dubai, UAE
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Shop Talk, Las Vegas, USA
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Awarded Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Tech at National Diversity Conference, Houston, USA
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AI & Machine Learning Strategies Summit, Toronto, CA
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2018
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MIT IDSS Retail Conference, MIT, Boston
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ODSC West, San Francisco
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Global Artificial Intelligence Conference, Santa Clara
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Women in Analytics Conference , Facebook HQ, CA
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AI World Forum Disrupt, San Francisco
2016
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RE-WORK Machine Intelligence Summit, New York
2019
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AI & Big Data,Santa Clara
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AI For Business Summit, Australia
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Lesbians Who Tech & Allies, New York City
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Southern Data Science Conference, Atlanta
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Marketing Analytics & Data Science, San Francisco
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Silicon Slopes Tech Summit, Salt Lake City
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2017
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Global AI Conference, New York
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AI & Future Of Curation, HUGE HQ, New York City
2015
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AirBNB OpenAir, AirBNB HQ, San Francisco
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Code As Craft Speaker Series, Etsy HQ, New Yoork
The Power of Multimodal Learning
in Production Scale E-Commerce
Search l Activate 2019
AI: Building the Future of E-Commerce | Kamelia Aryafar | Demystifying Data Science 2018
AI in Practice: Fact and Fiction l Activate 2019
Learning to Rank with Deep Visual Semantic Features l 2017
Learning to Rank in e-commerce l AI With The Best 2017
Machine Learning as the Key to Personalized Curation l 2015
The Market Place Holy Grail l Extract 2015
PUBLICATIONS & PRESS
Recent Industry Publications
Full Publications List:
Featured Press
Forbes, "30 Inspirational Women 2021"
​[1] Murium Iqbal, Kamelia Aryafar, and Timothy Andertoon. Style conditioned recommendations. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, RecSys 2019, Copenhagen, Denmark, September 16-20, pages 128-136, 2019.
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[2] Murium Iqbal, Nishan Subedi, and Kamelia Aryafar. Production ranking systems: A review. In Proceedings of SIGIR 2019 Workshop on eCommerce, co-located with the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, eCom@SIGIR 2019, Paris, France, July 25, 2019, 2019.
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[3] Murium Iqbal, Adair Kovac, and Kamelia Aryafar. Discovering style trends through deep visually aware latent item embeddings. In The IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) Workshops. IEEE, 2018.
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[4] Murium Iqbal, Adair Kovac, and Kamelia Aryafar, A multimodal recommender system for large-scale assortment generation in e-commerce. In The International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval Workshop on eCommerce. ACM, 2018.​
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[5] Kamelia Aryafar, Devin Guillory, and Liangjie Hong. An ensemble-based approach to click-through rate prediction for promoted listings at etsy. In Proceedings of the ADKDD'17. ACM, 2017.​​
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[6] Corey Lynch, Kamelia Aryafar, and Josh Attenberg. Images don't lie: Transferring deep visual semantic features to large-scale multimodal learning to rank. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. ACM, 2016.
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[7] Kamelia Aryafar, Corey Lynch, and Josh Attenber. Exploring user behaviour on etsy through dominant colors. In 22nd International Conference on Pattern Recognition, ICPR 2014, Stockholm, Sweden, August 24-28, 2014, 2014.
"The Future of Knowledge at Work "
- Bloomfire Interview
"Transform Decision Making with a Data Driven Culture" -CIO Application
"How Overstock is Breaking Out of The Filter Bubble" -Marketing Innovation Profile
"Data and AI Experts Share Predictions with Databricks: What the Future Holds for AI, Big Data and Analytics" -Business Wire
"Tangible Impacts of AI on the Business" -Databricks