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Twitter keeps poaching the most diverse top talent

The company's two-year hiring spree is creating a technical dream team of the most inclusion- and ethics-minded leaders in the industry.

Twitter keeps poaching the most diverse top talent

Rumman Chowdhury, the head of Twitter's META team, is just one of several well-respected, ethics-minded female leaders to have been hired for major roles at Twitter in the last year.

Twitter just poached Bumble's head of product design, a woman widely respected in her field for building with inclusion and accessibility. Lara Mendonça will lead Twitter's work using design to encourage meaningful conversation.


Mendonça, whose title will be senior manager of product design, is just the latest in a string of widely-respected, increasingly diverse, and ethics- and inclusion-minded hires over the last two years at Twitter: We broke down a quick list of some of the notable names (though this is by no means exhaustive).

  • Mendonça made a name for herself at Bumble with her vulnerability theory of design, which she told the Wall Street Journal was born out of her own experiences as a bisexual woman with ADHD from Brazil.
  • Rumman Chowdhury: Twitter's new head of its ML Ethics, Transparency and Accountability team (called META internally), Chowdhury was hired in February, just months after launching her own AI-ethics focused group called Parity AI. Chowdhury is one of the most widely-respected leaders in the AI ethics field, and news of her hire at Twitter drew widespread industry praise.
  • Jutta Williams: Hired nine months ago as the product lead for the META team, Williams left her job as senior technical lead for central privacy at Facebook after only a year. She helped lead Google's AI health research before her time at Facebook.
  • Rinki Sethi: The new CISO at Twitter filled the long-open role in September 2020; she was previously the CISO and VP at Rubrik and VP for information security at IBM.
  • Nikkia Reveillac: Twitter's head of research was promoted from interim to full-time director in June 2020, after less than a year on the company research team; she previously worked at Colgate for more than 13 years, spending her last few leading its research insights team.
  • Maya Gold Patterson: The young woman in charge of designing Twitter's audio-chat Spaces product made a name for herself writing about the challenges and frustrations of being a Black woman in tech.
  • Christine Su: The former "activist-entrepreneur" working on farming and climate change tech became the head of product for conversational safety in early 2020. In that role, she's focused on increasing user choice and control over the Twitter experience.

Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter's head of consumer product, and Dantley Davis, Twitter's chief design officer, both joined the company earlier (2018 and 2019, respectively), but they often profess the same philosophies as many of these newer hires. Twitter has spent the last two years emphasizing conversational health and user safety in its product announcements, and it appears the company is building out its team to reflect those commitments internally.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

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Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

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FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

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Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

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Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

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Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

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