Chris Albon is the Director of Machine Learning at the Wikimedia Foundation. Before that, Chris was the Director of Data Science in three previous roles and founded a data visualization company. He has worked in mission-driven technology companies and non-profits for over ten years, including disaster relief, healthcare, humanitarian aid, anti-corruption, conservation, and free knowledge. Chris has a Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Davis.

Email / X / Bluesky / GitHub / LinkedIn

Jobs

• Director of Machine Learning, Wikimedia Foundation, June 2020 - Present
• Advisor, BaseTen, August 2021 - 2022
• Director of Data Science, Devoted Health, July 2018 - April 2020
• Director of Data Science, BRCK, June 2017 - July 2018
• Co-founder, Popily, 2015 - 2016
• Director of Data Science, Ushahidi, 2013 - 2015
• Project Director, FrontlineSMS, 2011 - 2013

Projects

• Creator, AI Flashcards, 2018 - Present
  • Created handmade digital flashcards describing concepts in machine learning
  • Sold over 20,000 copies.
• Author, Machine Learning With Python Cookbook, O'Reilly Media, 2018
  • Authored the Python machine learning book in O'Reilly Media's cookbook series
  • Book is a highly regarded desk reference for working data scientists with 4.6 stars on Amazon
• Co-founder & Co-host, Partially Derivative, 2014 - 2017
  • Co-founded a popular podcast on data science and machine learning.

Talks

• Don't Do Invisible Work, NormConf, 2022
• More Ethical Machine Learning Using Model Cards At Wikimedia, apply(conf), 2022
• Keynote, TWIML, 2021
• MLOps At Wikimedia, DataCamp, MLOps.community, 2021
• ML Models And Infrastructure At Wikimedia, Weights And Biases, 2021
• Devoted Health And Data Science, Google Cloud Tech, 2019
• Getting Your First Data Science Job, DataCamp, 2018
• How To Learn Data Science, Metis Data Science Training, 2017

Education

• Ph.D., Political Science, University of California, Davis. 2012
  • Dissertation: Statistical modeling of rebel and government behavior towards health systems during and after civil wars.
• M.A., Political Science, University of California, Davis. 2010
• B.A., University of Miami, Miami, FL. 2006
  • Triple majored in political science, international studies, and religious studies.