Tom Finley

I live in Woodinville, Washington state. I originally come from Chagrin Falls, Ohio.

I received my PhD in computer science and machine learning in 2008 from Cornell. As an undergraduate at Duke I majored in computer science, and mathematics, and minored in economics.

Since graduation, I have worked for Microsoft. I am currently a principal software development engineer, in the Azure Data group. Other groups I’ve worked in previously have been Teams, Cloud + AI, and Bing. I tend to work on machine learning tools and processes in my work at Microsoft. In addition to ML I often work on API design and high performance computing.

My areas of expertise are boosting algorithms and linear algorithms, and machine learning problems with “weird” multi-variate loss functions. In my work I’ve tended to focus more on writing algorithms, tooling, and generally the experience of using ML, than specific single applications of ML.