Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com, details company revenue and international operations during a presentation at Data Driven NYC in October 2013.
Insight
Ancestry embeds data scientists into software teams to ensure production readiness
“What we've found, at least at Ancestry, is that we have to embed our data science Scientists into the actual engineering teams and make them talk every day. It improves the feature engineering, improves the domain knowledge, improves the likelihood that engine…”
Insight
Predictive machine learning models are useless if they cannot inform interventions
“One of the key learnings was that just because something's predictive doesn't mean that it's actionable.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Entity extraction elevated Ancestry's worst-performing data collections into its top 10
“It took what was some of our worst performing collections out of our 30,000, ah, collections, and put some of those collections into our top 10 best, ah, best collections.”
Insight
Technical architecture mirrors organizational structure, requiring coordinated team and system decoupling
“It's uncanny how technical architecture follows an organization, and so if you want to decouple systems, you have to decouple the organization. If you want tightly, ah, integrated, if you want something tightly integrated, you have to tightly integrate the org…”
Insight
Granting academics access to large datasets creates a data science recruiting pipeline
“If you have a large data set and can make it available for academic research, then you could create yourself a pipeline of potentially good data science candidates because they know how to deal with large amounts of data, but they also know your data pretty we…”
Assertion Supported
Ancestry has 2.7 million paying subscribers and leads online family history
“So, ah, at Ancestry.com, we're the largest online resource for family history, and, ah, we've got 2.7 million paying subscribers.”