Ethics and Data Science

Jeff Hammerbacher is a founder and the chief scientist of Cloudera and an assistant professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Before co-founding Cloudera, Hammerbacher conceived, built, and led the data team at Facebook. The data team was responsible for inventing and building powerful data analysis applications on Hadoop. That system is the core data platform at Facebook for improving the user experience and driving revenue. Before he joined Facebook, Hammerbacher worked as a quantitative analyst on Wall Street. He earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Harvard University.

Forbes Magazine named Hammerbacher one of the world’s seven most powerful data scientists, and Technology Review named him one of its 35 Innovators under 35 in 2011. Along with DJ Patil , Hammerbacher coined the term “data scientist,” and he has been key to driving the success of Hadoop as a standard tool for processing large, unstructured data sets with a network of commodity computers.

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,” Hammerbacher told Businessweek in 2011.“That sucks.”