Laura Edell

Chief Data Scientist, AI Markets & Innovation Microsoft

Laura is the Chief Data Scientist, leading a team of data scientists at Microsoft focused on building new market opportunities in the AI and sustainability space. In 2020, her podcast ‘Annielytics’ went live and found tremendous success focusing on Women in Tech and Girls in STEM, two near and dear areas to her heart and spawned a 2nd podcast focused on women in the data science and AI tech arena called “An Eye 4 AI with Annielytics”.In 2020 and 2021, Medium named Laura one of the top influencers working in Data Science today, where she continues to drive innovation and curiosity in her thought leadership. Before joining Microsoft, Laura worked for Apple on Siri Gen 1 and was a leader at Expedia, where her work leading the effort to build the flight pricing optimization algorithms resulted in tremendous revenue gains but also provided a great life lesson after she inadvertently included a bug in her code, which resulted in a glaring red text-based error & a sizable revenue loss. This seemingly substantial error taught Laura the value of incorporating a more DevOps focus into her ML scripting and programming work (now known as MLOps) that she continues to evangelize today.Laura is also an avid fantasy football fan. Her ensemble algorithmic approach ( a combo of deep neural nets and greedy reinforcement learning bandits ) have won her the league title several years in a row, shutting down those who said statistics could never trump the tribal knowledge gained through years of watching football and playing fantasy sports. In 2022, it seems everyone is on the stats train to which she says “all aboard” enthusiastically.Outside of work, Laura volunteers with several organizations like DigiGirlz, GirlsWhoCode and SheSTEM4Students, which all center on introducing technology to female students in Kindergarten in our public school system through Senior high school. She is also a classically trained pianist and former Florida-state champion, although these days she plays out of her love for Rachmoninoff and Debussy, the latter drawing on the influence of Russian Romanticism of which the former was considered the great “influencer” of his time. In fact, many people, including Laura, believe that math and music are very closely aligned. She especially loves the formulaic progressions and wonderful tonality achieved when she composes her own pieces of music. Laura also has dyslexia, something she now embraces wholeheartedly. What was once called a disability is something she views as a gift, and she attributes this to the tools and thought processes she was trained to utilize as a child which ultimately shaped her curious outlook and creative approach as a thought leader and peer rated top influencer in the data science space..