Gordon Rios

What was your first job ever?
Math tutor, MESA (http://mesa.ucop.edu), at Albany High School.

What did you do after graduation?
After graduating from IEOR I returned to full time work at Inktomi Corp. (one of the early search engine companies) which was founded by Prof. Eric Brewer from UCB.

What are you currently working on?
I'm currently working on machine learning- based recommender systems for radio. My work also includes mentoring and collaborating with a team of data scientists.

Do you have any advice for current IEOR students?
Operations research is one of the most powerful disciplines for working in data science today; yet, there are relatively few working in technology - your IEOR training, along with additional courses in Machine Learning, will allow you to write your own ticket. At Pandora, we have a thriving data science team and we'd be happy to see you here 😀

What do you miss about being a student at Cal?
Campus life ... study groups with my friends ... going to social events ... the support from other students and my advisor (Prof. Stuart Dreyfus).