Chris Ballard is a Data Scientist and Machine Learning practitioner with a passion to use data to make a difference. This has developed through 20 years of experience as an engineering and data science technical leader, product manager, consultant and CTO. Throughout all the sectors I have worked in – edtech, ecommerce, market research, climate tech and security – has been a desire to use my technical and business skills to enable those organisations to take advantage of the data they collect to make a meaningful impact.
Chris started his career with Tribal, a global education technology provider, where he developed a passion to help clients gain insight from large and complex data sources. In this organisation, he led the research and development of a new analytics platform for higher education, which used machine learning to predict student outcomes.
Chris was responsible for NLP and Applied Machine Learning Research at NielsenIQ where he led a large team of ML engineers and research scientists developing machine learning for product attribution at scale to help people better understand the food they consume and the products they purchase. More recently, Chris was CTO for a climate tech startup using NLP to understand climate policy and laws, where he developed a semantic search tool for policy makers.
He is currently Lead Data Scientist for Tessian, using machine learning to protect our customers from targeted phishing email attacks.