About Us

As the role of data science and analytics is expanding very rapidly in creating new business
models or changing existing ones, the demand for data science professionals is growing at an
increasing rate. However, almost every company in the industry has a unique way of defining
roles and assigning titles in data analytics related positions which have resulted in a chaotic
market that is confusing to employers, academic and training institutions, and data science
professionals.

Launched to develop industry standards for data science professionals, through a collaborative
process with businesses, academia, and the data science community, IADSS is an independent
initiative, aiming to present a framework for the knowledge and skills required in data science
and support building measurement and assessment methodologies for analytics and data
science professionals.

IADSS has since developed the most comprehensive framework for skills and knowledge in
data science with input from 1000+ data science leaders and academicians. Recently published
at Harvard Data Science Review, this framework details the skills and knowledge that
collectively define ‘data science’ as a field and provides much needed clarity for professional as
well as organizations that are hiring, managing and training them. The initiative has further
grouped these skills to provide standardized definitions for the most commonly observed roles
such as ‘data scientist’, ‘data engineer’ and ‘data analyst’ which makes career planning and
matching the right person to the right job much easier. IADSS is also active in the data science
community and will work to create awareness and promote data science & analytics standards
globally.

Co-Founders

Usama M. Fayyad, Ph.D.

Usama serves as founder/CEO of Open Insights (founded in 2008) where he works with large and small enterprises on Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning, BigData strategy, and launching new business models based on Data Assets: Most recently serving as Interim CTO for Stella.AI, a VC-funded startup in AI for HR/recruiting; and Interim COTO of MTN2.0 – helping develop new revenue streams in mobile payments/MFS and Data-as-a-Service businesses at MTN, Africa’s largest mobile operator.

Usama was the first Global Chief Data Officer & Group Managing Director at Barclays in London (2013-2016) where he also took on additional role as CIO of Risk, Finance & Treasury Technology in 2015. From 2010-2013 Usama was the co-founder of OASIS-500, a tech startup investment fund, following his appointment as Founding Executive Chairman in 2010 by King Abdullah II of Jordan. Up until joining Barclays in 2013, he was also Chairman, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Blue Kangaroo Corp building a mobile search engine service for offers personalization and activation based in Silicon Valley. His background includes Chairman/CEO roles at several startups, including DMX Group (acquired by Yahoo!) and digiMine (Audience Science) which was founded in 2000 in Seattle to build hosted data warehousing and data mining solutions for Fortune 500 companies.

He was the first person ever to hold the Chief Data Officer (CDO) title when Yahoo! acquired his second startup in 2004. In addition to CDO, he was also the Executive VP of Research and Strategic Data Solutions where he was running Yahoo!'s global data strategy, architecting its data policies and systems, and managing its data analytics and data processing infrastructure. The data teams he built at Yahoo! collected, managed, and processed over 25 terabytes of data per day, and drove a major part of ad targeting revenue and data insights businesses globally. He also founded Yahoo! Research Labs where much of the early work on BigData made it open source and established the early collaborations that launched Hadoop and other open source contributions.

Usama held leadership roles at Microsoft (1996-2000) and founded the machine learning systems group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (1989-1995), where his work on machine learning resulted in the top Excellence in Research award from Caltech, and a U.S. Government medal from NASA.

Usama earned his Ph.D. in engineering in AI/Machine Learning from the University of Michigan. He holds two BSE’s in Engineering, MSE Computer Engineering and M.Sc. in Mathematics. He has published over 100 technical articles on data mining, data science, AI/ML, and databases; and holds over 30 patents, is a Fellow of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). He is active in the academic community with several adjunct professor posts and is the only person to receive both the ACM’s SIGKDD Innovation Award (2007) and Service Award (2003). He has edited two influential books on data mining and served as editor-in-chief on two key industry journals. He is an active angel investor and advisor in many early-stage tech startups across the U.S., Europe and the Middle East. He served on the boards or advisory boards of several private and public companies including Criteo, Invensense, RapidMiner, Stella.AI, Martini Media, Virsec, Silniva, Abe.AI, Medio, NetSeer, Choicestream, and others. On the academic front, he is on advisory boards of the Data Science Institute at Imperial College, AAI at UTS, and The University of Michigan College of Engineering.

Hamit Hamutcu

Hamit Hamutcu has 25 years of industry and consulting experience in the areas of analytics and data-driven business strategy. He is the co-founder at Initiative for Analytics and Data Science Standards (IADSS), launched to develop industry standards for the knowledge and skills required in data science and support building a measurement and assessment methodology for analytics and data science professionals. He is also the co-founder at Analytics Center, a company focused on capability building in data science, and an advisor or investor in several data-related initiatives and start-ups.

Previously, Hamit was a founding partner for EMEA offices for Peppers & Rogers Group and led the development of the firm in the region by serving clients across Europe, Middle East, and Africa; he was also a partner for the firm’s US office, heading up its Global Analytics Group, where he oversaw the growth of the analytics practice and helped his clients develop analytics organizations, build data infrastructure, and deploy models to support business goals. He held several positions within FedEx in Memphis in marketing analytics and technology, where he led IT and business teams to leverage the enormous amount of data the company generated to serve its customers better. Hamit is also a frequent speaker, writer, and board member at various startups and nonprofit organizations. He earned his BSc degree in electronics engineering at Bogazici University in Istanbul and his MBA degree at the University of Florida.