hilary mason education

Hi. I'm Hilary Mason.

Hi, I’m Hilary.

Simply: I make beautiful things with data.

I’m the Founder of Fast Forward Labs, a machine intelligence research company, and the Data Scientist in Residence at Accel. Previously, I was the Chief Scientist at bitly. I also co-founded of HackNY, co-host DataGotham, and am a member of NYCResistor.

I believe technology should give us superpowers.

At Fast Forward Labs, we are building those superpowers.

I’m a Data Scientist in Residence at Accel, where I get the chance to advise companies large and small on their data strategy.

I spent four years as Chief Scientist at bitly, where I led an amazing team that studied attention on the internet in realtime, doing a mix of research, exploration, and engineering.

I co-founded HackNY, a non-profit that helps talented engineering students find their way into the startup community of creative technologists in New York City.

I’m an enthusiastic member of the larger conspiracy to evolve the emerging discipline of data science.

I’m a native New Yorker and I love this city and the technology community here.

I am an advisor to a few organizations that I adore, including Mortar, knod.es, collective[i], and DataKind. I’m a mentor to Betaspring, the Providence, Rhode Island-based startup accelerator, and the Harvard Business School Digital Initiative.

I was a member of Mayor Bloomberg’s Technology and Innovation Advisory Council, which was a fascinating way to learn how government and industry can work together.

I’ve received a few honors, like the TechFellows Engineering Leadership award, and was on the Forbes 40 under 40 Ones to Watch list and Crain’s New York 40 under Forty list. I’ve also been in Glamour, the WSJ, Fast Company, Scientific American, and more, which has made my mother very happy.

I like to give talks, and have spoken about how to replace yourself with a very small shell script, on e-mail hacking, machine learning: a love story, and more.

I also keep a fun mostly photo-oriented blog of mostly New York adventures at hilary.nyc.

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• INNOVATION FESTIVAL
• Capital One

06-18-2013 CREATIVITY BY THE NUMBERS

Meet The Data Scientist: How Hilary Mason Turns Research Into Business Solutions

Hilary Mason, chief scientist at Bitly, makes meaning out of massive data sets. Or, as she describes it, she “pushes potential forward.”

BY  Drake Baer 3 minute read

Bitly grew up with the social web. Going on five years in operation, your favorite URL-shortener now sees tens of millions of links shared per day. Those links see hundreds of millions of clicks.

That’s a ton of data–and it’s the job of Hilary Mason, the New York company’s chief scientist, to figure out what to do with it. Making useful things out of data sometimes requires what seems like an unexpected creative leap–the ability to see how a mandate for research on one track can turn into a product on another. In other words, data scientists solve business problems that aren’t immediately apparent, turning research into something unexpected.

Technology, she’s proclaimed , should give us super powers–and she’s a prime example. Having studied computer science and algorithms at Brown and written the book on machine learning, she has also algorithmically uncovered the mediocrity of New York restaurants.

At Bitly, her job, as she describes it in her bio, is a mix of pure research, exploring, and engineering. “My role is chief scientist,” says Mason. “What I really do is push potential forward.”

The solution-creating work the data science team does opens up opportunities for businesses to solve a problem in the market, Mason says, even it wasn’t immediately apparent. Such was the case for Bitly’s attention-ranking product, Realtime.

Realtime , a product of Bitly-labs, shows what’s being clicked on and shared across the Bitlyverse. There you’ll find a front page with a range of stories that are getting a “disproportionate spike of attention.” These will often be celebrity stories–look out for the Kardashians and Biebers–but also unexpected ones. The afternoon of our interview, the trailer for a movie called Elysium came out, generating a huge spike in interest and sending it to the front page.

“The research goal behind that was to know what is happening in the world right now,” Mason says. “The product goal was to be able to make that really complicated set of information useful to people.”

The interface is simple: If you click on a front-page link, you’ll be taken to the links “story bundle,” which is Bitly for taking in a story in aggregate, rather than individual URLs.

You can also see geographic distribution of readers: In that story bundle, you’ll see what percentage of readers are in which country–and the cities within the country that are paying attentions. That geographic awareness also lets you make local queries: In a few clicks you can see what people are talking about in New York, food in Chicago, or in Los Angeles. It’s like a living atlas of the Internet’s attention, born out of years of Bitly’s data development.

“We built a system that mathematically tells us what the world is paying attention to,” she says. “Then we built a product that exposes that.”

“(Realtime)’s very useful for a problem we didn’t even think about in the beginning,” he says, “which is that brands often want to share content around ideas that they want to associate their brand with.”

Brands want to be associated with certain ideas or scenes–be it extreme sports, art, or celebrities–and Realtime is a tool that can allow them to see how people are paying attention to those dimensions. The technology beneath the tech demo will be integrated into Bitly’s enterprise suite–which has users from BirchBox to the New York Times to the Dalai Lama. In this way, the insight-generating work that the data science team does builds potential for business.

That’s the art and craft of data science: taking a hunch you have about the world and pursuing it in a structural, mathematical way to understand something new about the world.

“You have to be creative about the choices you make and how you construct those models to get a useful answer and a truthful answer,” she says. “Data scientists, as professionals, have that task.”

Mason leads those professionals. To do that, she has to know what is and what could be: a mixture of understanding what’s in Bitly’s data, in their engineering, and in the research community–and combining all those possibilities into something that hasn’t been built before.

“We see behavior from billions of people a month,” she says. “It really is the scale of human behavior on the Internet.”

[ Image: Flickr user Jazbeck , Von Aisaider , and Sandy Noble ]

Apply to the Most Innovative Companies Awards and be recognized as an organization driving the world forward through innovation. Extended deadline: October 11.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Drake Baer was a contributing writer at Fast Company, where he covered work culture. He's the co-author of Everything Connects, a book about how intrapersonal, interpersonal, and organizational psychology shape innovation.   More

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Hilary Mason

Hilary Mason is Founder and CEO of Fast Forward Labs, a machine intelligence research company, where she leads a team of applied researchers advising Fortune 500 executives, governments, and startups. She's also the Data Scientist in Residence at Accel Partners, a silicon valley venture capital firm. Previously, Hilary was Chief Scientist at bitly. She co-hosts a DataGotham, a conference for New York's home grown data community, and co-founded HackNY, a non-profit that helps engineering students find opportunities in New York's creative technical economy. She’s on the board of the Anita Borg Institute and an advisor to startups including Sparkfun Electronics, Wildcard, and Wonder. Hilary served on Mayor Bloomberg’s Technology Advisory Board, and is a member of Brooklyn hacker collective NYC Resistor.

Hidden Door

Hilary Mason

Co-Founder at Hidden Door

Hilary Mason has had a long and varied career in technology. Hilary began their career in 2004 as an Assistant Professor at Johnson & Wales University. In 2008, they moved to Path101, Inc. as a Scientist. In 2009, they began working at bitly as a Scientist Emeritus and Chief Scientist. In 2010, they co-founded hackNY.org with Evan Korth and Chris Wiggins. In 2012, they co-founded and co-organized DataGotham. In 2013, they took on the role of Data Scientist in Residence at Accel Partners. In 2014, they founded and became CEO of Fast Forward Labs. In 2017, they became the GM of Machine Learning at Cloudera. In 2020, they became a Co-Founder of Hidden Door. Additionally, they have been a Member of the Board of Directors of the Anita Borg Institute for Women in Technology since 2015.

Hilary Mason attended Grinnell College from 1997 to 2000, where they earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Computer Science. Hilary then continued their studies at Brown University in Computer Science.

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Hilary Mason

Hilary Mason is the Founder of Fast Forward Labs, a machine intelligence research company, and the Data Scientist in Residence at Accel. Previously, Hilary was the Chief Scientist at bitly. She also co-founded of HackNY, co-host DataGotham, and is a member of NYCResistor.

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• video Data Driven NYC A Process for Discovery Hilary Mason D&S advisor Hilary Mason presents her process for discovering changes in markets. Read on Data Driven NYC December 2016
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