Szilard studied Physics in the 90s and obtained a PhD by using statistical methods to analyze the risk of financial portfolios. For the last decade he’s been the Chief Scientist of a tech company in California doing everything data (analysis, modeling, data visualization, data engineering, machine learning etc). He is the founder of the LA R and LA data science meetups and the data community website datascience.la, he is the author of a well-known machine learning benchmark on github (1000+ stars), a frequent speaker at data science conferences, and he has developed and taught graduate machine learning courses at two universities (UCLA and CEU).