Boaz Yemini

As a researcher, I belong to both the rapidly declining discipline of Economics and the booming professional network of Data Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers. In the 1990s, people such as myself used to be called – Quants. It had nothing to do with the Quantum. We were defined as such since our job was to quantitatively analyze the capital markets, the Big Data of the then. Nowadays, most of us are so-heavily focused on the Internet. I was ‘trained to think’ under the widespread umbrella of economic analysis, where they taught me to investigate questions and new hypotheses, i.e., theorize Models to be statistically tested against real world Data. My thesis offered an analysis of Central Banks in an economic environment of Bubbles & Crashes. As for what I do with it to earn a living, I am of those to be blamed for all the annoying ads we encounter online, in apps and websites. There’s no glory there, but some, sometimes, even call the purely statistical models I build (to maximize revenues from ads) – ‘AI’ (Artificial Intelligence). Few models are considered by many physicists as ‘real things’, and not the mere approximation-functions such tools truly are. As a predictive modeling architect, I have some pretty solid thoughts on the matter.