Kevin Hanley
Nominated Award: Young AI Role Model of the Year
Linkedin profile of Person: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-hanley-datasci/
Kevin is an exceptional data scientist with massive potential. He has significant experience in driving innovation in AI and automation in machine learning model creation and management. He has excellent stakeholder engagement skills, working with colleagues internally with confidence, including the CTO and CPO, as well as external clients when needed. He has played a key role as part of teams which have driven revenue and significant insights across travel, pharma and insurance verticals. He has also been heavily involved in leading data driven products from inception to delivery, with proof of value.
Reason for Nomination
For the last 2.5 years, I’ve had the pleasure to directly manage Kevin at Arvoia. Kevin is an exceptional data scientist, by far the best I’ve worked with in my career. I often refer to him as a rockstar and his potential is immense! He is a leader without authority, and a wonderful support to me and mentor to his colleagues. I’ve been consistently impressed by him in the last 2.5 years and whole heartedly endorse him as an exceptional data scientist.
Some examples of scenarios of Kevin’s individual contribution and the impact they brought to Arvoia:
Some projects he has driven include:
The creation of Recommender Systems for the hospitality booking experience
• End-to-end involvement in the creation of the product from design to delivery
• ETL and Feature Engineering, creation of a workflow for training and testing of multiple machine learning models to produce the best model and deployment of models to production
• Automation of the refresh process for retraining models to accommodate for data drift
• Creation and automation of reporting that uses real-time control comparisons to quantifiably prove 20 times ROI
An experimental platform for running real-time A/B testing
• Ability to setup experiments in 5 mins, without the need for any code
• Guidance on the statistical validity of experiments and provision of estimates on recommended run time
• Execution in real-time with the creation of a randomly selected 50/50 split of
traffic amongst different variants
• Maintain 200ms SLA for response times
• Creation of the reporting KPIs and distribution of automated Tableau reports of experiment performance
• This platform can be used across multiple different products and customer segments, while still maintaining the necessary statistical rigour
Additional Information:
Reference from CPO: As Chief Product Officer, I had the absolute pleasure of working with Kevin for 2 years at Arvoia. Kevin has the rare ability to translate the complexities of AI and data science into practical, client-driven solutions. He was instrumental in not only our product definition and refinement process, but also regularly contributed to our strategic roadmap in the form of product concepts and key performance metrics. Kevin’s input was highly valued across the team where he was able to lead and clearly articulate our AI direction and impact across client engagement, product, development and QA. In team retrospectives, Kevin was always quick to celebrate our successes and was an amazing motivational force across the team. As an outstanding data scientist, a motivational leader and a key contributor to our product roadmap, I would highly recommend Kevin as a valuable asset to any organisation.
Reference from CTO:
Kevin is one of those individuals who makes the complex look easy.. I’ve been consistently impressed by him in the last 2.5 years and whole heartedly endorse him as an exceptional data scientist. I’ve had the pleasure in watching Kevin thrive in a data driven environment, his collaboration with the team around him has been excellent, working side by side with developers, QA, Product and Scrum to bring a vision for AI at a scale to life with a level of automation that would put the biggest tech enterprises to shame. He’s been fundamental to what we achieved and should be proud of the achievements of the team in terms of model re-trains in 20 mins (that’s not a typo) and an ability to provide sub 200ms AI responses to our clients resulting in a superior experience for content and display. He’s not afraid to push for what is right, to push for the best quality data to achieve outcomes – and to challenge inefficiency. I’ve personally watched him present excellent concepts in areas such as image recognition, data observability and automation of AI model re-trains. He is diligent and data-focused – he is hard working and approachable and was involved in so much of what is great about the Arvoia AI Platform. I have no doubt that Kevin will thrive in any organisation which has the good sense to listen to his views and give him a platform to affect change in the area of Data Science. He has earned that right and I know his talents and insights will see him continue to progress to become a great leader in this key area for businesses everywhere. An Arvoia Rockstar!