Olly Downs

Olly Downs is a machine learning scientist, seasoned technology leader, serial technology entrepreneur and AI100 winning Founder/CEO, credited with bringing advanced analytics and machine learning methods to bear as the creative spark behind numerous early-stage technology companies and larger enterprises, operating around the world. Teams Olly has led have built business-enabling technologies that have returned almost $2.5bn in business value on $250M in venture investment.

Olly is currently Chief Data Scientist at Curinos and advises businesses in online display advertising, context aware computing, location-based services, spatial reasoning, semantic technologies, broadcast data services, social graph analytics, and individualized medicine, through his company Analytical Insights, Inc.

Olly specializes in applying abstract analytical ideas from mathematical, physical and statistical science to problems in the real world, and commercializing them; to date this has resulted in 42 granted US patents in the fields of Quantum Optimization Algorithms, Dynamic Time Series Prediction, Location-based Data Probes, Bayesian Prediction, Statistical Estimation, Outlier Detection, Real-Time GPS Data Processing, Anomaly Detection and Scalable Spatial Search.

As Principal Scientist at INRIX, the first technology spin-out from Microsoft Research, Olly delivered a world-first in the provision of real-time traffic information using a nationwide network of GPS-enabled probe vehicles (named 2007 Breakthrough Technology of the Year by the Washington Software Alliance).

Olly’s work has included pioneering applications of predictive analytics, probabilistic and location-based reasoning for RocketFuel, Blab, AdReady, Farecast and MSN and offline analytics; including financial mathematics, quantum computing and Bayesian estimation, for HERE, SiriusXM, Globys, L1 Partners, D-Wave Systems, Apollo Data Technologies, Microsoft Research, Barnes & Noble, Knight Ridder, Ryder and IGT.

Olly has Erdös Number 3.