Bio

Hilary Mason

Hilary Mason is the Chief Scientist at bit.ly, where she finds sense in vast data sets. Her work involves both pure research and development of product-focused features.

She’s also a co-founder of HackNY (hackny.org), a non-profit organization that connects talented student hackers from around the world with startups in NYC.

Hilary recently started the data science blog Dataists (dataists.com) and is a member of hacker collective NYC Resistor.

She has discovered two new species, loves to bake cookies, and asks way too many questions.

Contact me here.

Presentation Highlights

I gave a well-received talk (that I had a ton of fun with!) at Strange Loop 2010 called Machine Learning: A Love Story. I also gave the Keynote at PyCon 2011, and am perhaps most well known for my short Ignite talk, How to Replace Yourself with a Very Small Shell Script.

  • Pingback: Should you attend Hadoop World? Yes.

  • Pingback: TimesOpen 2.0: Big Data Event - NYTimes.com

  • 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.