Bio

hilary mason

Hi, I’m Hilary.

Simply: I make beautiful things with data.

I’m the Chief Scientist at bitly, co-founder of HackNY, creator of dataists, and member of NYCResistor.

More:

I believe technology should give us superpowers.

I’m the Chief Scientist at bitly, where we study 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 knod.es, collective[i], and DataKind. I’m a mentor to Betaspring, the Providence, Rhode Island-based startup accelerator, and TechStars New York.

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

I’ve received a few honors this year, 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, 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.

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  • Clint Robison

    Listened to you talk on the web at the Web2.0 Expo. VERY interesting. I’ve been a programmer in government, startup, big corporation, and freelance for 15 years and have always just “handled” pesky data as outlined in the mockup/schematic. Up until just a few days ago, I viewed data as a mundane task that I would have to sanitize and normalize for my program to meet requirements. Your talk changed my view. I think I went from programmer to “data person” overnight. Lately I’ve been spending alot of time scraping data from local government (arrests, municipal traffic tickets, court information, and traffic data) just for fun and profit. After your talk (and others), I mashed much of that data to Farmer’s Almanac data and found a crime spike on full moons! How cool!! Over the past 10 years in Oklahoma City the highest crime rates occurred on hot weekends following a payday/welfare check disbursements on clear evenings with a full moon. This is so exciting to me. Thank you for your talk. Initially I just stopped to see who the hot chic was but then your bitly analytics captured my attention and started to blow my mind. I just wanted to let you know that you are responsible for really tweaking my interest that will likely result in a career change! Take care.

  • Ma’alona

    Loved ‘Machine Learning: A Love Story’! Am even more interested in machine learning now :) Thank you.

  • Hurumph

    OK, data scientist and lover of cheeseburgers is easy enough to understand and connecting hackers with NYC startups is great, but how on earth do you fit the discovery of two new species in to all of this? Was your first degree in the botany of Mount Kinabalu or similar?

  • http://www.facebook.com/tom.kornblit Tom Kornblit

    Your awesome. Keep up the good work.

  • Compscipro

    Funny — I didn’t look closely and thought you were holding flowers.  Silly me.  You are holding data — that is adorable!  You did a fantastic job speaking to the eclectic audience at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing!  I think it was interesting to all.  Certainly it was to me!  Good job.  Carry on.

  • Jeri Ellsworth

    Love this photo of you!

  • http://profile.yahoo.com/2J6U2DTRZPBOZYGAOIDYVMIC6M Christopher

    u made bitly?

  • Michaelbrown077

    Im in love

  • http://twitter.com/yoklikcom yoklik.com

    Nice bio.