Maria Dimakopoulou

Maria Dimakopoulou is Director of Machine Learning at Spotify, where she is leading the Homepage Personalization Engineering organization. This is a 60+-people organization that is responsible for generating, ranking and distributing personalized content recommendations across music, podcasts and audiobooks on the Spotify’s homepage of 615+ million listeners. The 9 teams of Homepage Personalization Engineering innovate in a range of ML disciplines – contextual bandits, reinforcement learning, attention-based deep networks, multi-objective optimization & causal inference – as well as ML infrastructure, data engineering and backend systems at scale. Before Spotify, Maria Dimakopoulou was at Netflix, first driving Causal ML initiatives and subsequently building and leading the Adaptive Experimentation cross-functional working group of researchers, engineers and data scientists focused on delivering new experimentation capabilities at Netflix. Prior to Netflix, she did her PhD on Reinforcement Learning & Causal Inference at Stanford, where she was advised by Benjamin Van Roy & Susan Athey, and she worked at Google Research on the design and deployment of large-scale optimization algorithms for Google Technical Infrastructure and Google Ad Exchange.