Assertion certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Ancestry's database finds over 40 fourth-cousin matches per user on average

Scott Sorensen · Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital) · Jan 16, 2014 · at 12:57

Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com, explains how scaling the company's DNA database improves genomic matching results for users.

0:00 / 0:11exact quote · 11.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“With over 200,000 samples, we can find on average over 40 fourth cousin only matches and more third and second cousins for every other person on our, in our database.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Scott Sorensen

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…”
Scott Sorensen Jan 16, 2014 ▶ 20:23 Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
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.”
Scott Sorensen Jan 16, 2014 ▶ 8:25 Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
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.”
Scott Sorensen Jan 16, 2014 ▶ 9:35 Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
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…”
Scott Sorensen Jan 16, 2014 ▶ 21:52 Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
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…”
Scott Sorensen Jan 16, 2014 ▶ 22:42 Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
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.”
Scott Sorensen Jan 16, 2014 ▶ 0:42 Scott Sorensen, CTO of Ancestry.com // Data Driven 19 // October 2013 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 400 conversations transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.