Ondrej Brichta

I’m a seasoned professional working with AI for over 7 years now. I worked for two startups in Bratislava, Slovakia. Both were a success story. I’m currently leaving a position at Microsoft where I’m a senior data scientist. I got to Microsoft last year through acquisition of a process mining startup called Minit. In Minit and later in Microsoft, I was responsible for all AI features as the product owner for AI and lead AI developer. I was designing all of our AI based features and continually expanding our product. For some of the features I was also the lead developer, for others I was overseeing the development of the feature based on my algorithm designs. The features I designed and developed included for example business process simulation software that used machine learning together with genetic algorithm to create best version of the business process based on user defined KPIs. Another feature was a predictions module where users could create machine learning models with minimal knowledge of data science.

I also have experience with leading other people including leading a data science R&D unit at my previous startup position in Exponea (acquired by Bloomreach).

In all my experience, I have always treated AI in a holistic approach, which means that I did not use neural networks and deep learning for every task imaginable. NN and DL have their place in my approach to data science and are definitely best for some tasks, but for fast solutions using well thought out simpler machine learning algorithms together with heuristic or metaheuristic optimizations is often better.