What would you like to talk about? Reinforcement Learning, Causal Inference, Contextual Bandits, Adaptive Experimentation, Off-Policy Evaluation & Learning

Bio: I am the Engineering Product Area Lead of Home Personalization at Spotify. The Home Personalization Product Area consists of 60+ Engineers, spanning ML research, ML engineering, backend, data & web, and 7 Engineering Managers. It is an ML-focused organization that is responsible for generating, ranking and distributing a personalized content diet across music, podcasts and audiobooks on Spotify’s Homepage that maximizes listeners’ joy while supporting Spotify’s strategic needs for the 430+ million Spotify listeners. The teams within the Home Personalization Product Areas innovate on a range of ML disciplines – contextual bandits, reinforcement learning, attention-based deep networks, multi-objective optimization and causal inference – as well as ML infrastructure, data and systems at scale.

Prior to that, I was Senior Manager of ML Engineering, leading the Home Ranking and the Home Assembly teams within the Home Personalization Product Area. Before joining Spotify, I was at Netflix, first driving causal recommendation initiatives and subsequently building and leading the Adaptive Experimentation team, which was a cross-functional team of researchers, engineers and data scientists focused on delivering new experimentation capabilities at Netflix (adaptive bandit-based online tests instead of A/B tests; valid inference from adaptive online tests; ML-based short-term proxy metrics of long-term online metrics etc.).

Prior to Netflix, I did a PhD on reinforcement learning and causal inference at Stanford where I was advised by Benjamin Van Roy and Susan Athey and I worked at Google Research on the design and deployment of large-scale optimization algorithms for Google Technical Infrastructure and Google Ad Exchange. Latest honors include being selected in Spotify’s R&D Senior Leadership Program (20 managers selected annually from Spotify’s 3K+ people R&D division), being named in Forbes 30 under 30 Greece for industry and academic impact, and being the recipient of Stanford’s Outstanding Academic Achievement award.

I enjoy tennis, swimming, traveling around the world and exploring impressionist & surrealist art.

Maria has previously spoken at a WiDS AI & ML Sweden event.