FreeYourID Labs Distinguished Speaker Series – Hilary Mason

The Secret Life of Social Links

More communication than ever before is happening online, and for the first time, much of that data is available to be analyzed. Bitly began as a simple URL shortener and has evolved into a content sharing and analytics platform spanning the social web, with tens of millions of URLs and hundreds of millions of clicks on those URLs daily. I'll discuss the kinds of questions that we ask and the pieces that we need to find answers, which draw from many disciplines (machine learning, sociology, and engineering, to name a few), and discuss the big questions afforded by this kind of data and the infrastructure required to support these systems in real-time.

About Hilary

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, 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 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.