Today's guest is Wally Lo Faro, VP of Data Science at Mastercard. Wally has successfully built the data science capabilities and team in MasterCard Operations and Technology over the past five years. He is responsible for applying advanced techniques for improving and maintaining data quality of very large data sets, information product ideation and development as well as applying data science principles for process improvement.

Wally has applied techniques from the areas of mathematics, machine learning, information retrieval, text analysis and statistics to design highly scalable approximate string matching systems, data quality monitoring and alerting systems, and fraud detection applications. He has also worked in designing marketing analytics and modeling environments, as well as building scalable and personalized recommendation engines.

In the episode, Wally will tell you about:

Interesting projects he is leading at Mastercard,

How his role has evolved in his 13 years with the company,

Transitioning from academia to industry,

3 ways you can get involved in AI and Data Science,

What the ideal Data Science team looks like,

How to successfully add business value from Data Science projects, 

and What he looks for in an interview