Who I am and What I do
I am a data scientist and artificial intelligence researcher.Currently, I am a co-founding managing partner and chief technology officer at Differential Venture Partners, a venture capital investment firm focusing on seed-stage technology companies building software solutions for the future of data.
I am also a restauranteur, having launched 3 kosher restaurants: Citron & Rose, The Dairy Cafe, and Zagafen. Citron & Rose was originally a collaboration with award-winning Zahav chef Michael Solomonov focused on Eastern European cuisine. It has evolved through a few changes, and is now more of a Mediterranean-themed tavern. The Dairy Cafe was a quick-serve community dairy restaurant, but it closed in 2018. Zagafen is an Italian-focused pizza wine bar. It is a collaboration with Greg Dodge's Zavino Hospitality Group, which is managing the restaurant for me. The Zagafen menu is a mashup of kosher versions of items from ZHG's Zavino and Tredici restaurants. All of my restaurants are under the Orthodox Union (OU) supervision.
I previously worked at Renaissance Technologies, a hedge-fund management company based in Eastern Long Island. During my first term at Renaissance, I was head of production for the better part of a decade. I was also the highest-ranked technical employee for a number of years, implementing and overseeing the implementation of a trading system which has been used by Renaissance for two decades. In 2006, I retired from my management position at Renaissance and moved to Philadelphia. After a four-year break, during which I tried angel investing and teaching at Penn, I returned to Renaissance as a tele-commuting researcher, first in the Futures research group and then in the Equities research group. I left Renaissance again in May 2017, and I am currently available for work in data science outside of the financial industry.
I am also the founder and president of The Kohelet Foundation, a private foundation focused on Jewish education. The Kohelet Foundation has been focused on developing the Yeshiva Lab School, a new progressive, student-centered model for dual curriculum elementary education. We also have run the annual Kohelet Prize competition, which awards up to six $36,000 awards each year to educators to reward innovation, creativity, and bravery in education. The Kohelet Foundation is going into a silent phase starting in 2020. I will continue to fund Jewish education and other Jewish communal activities, especially The Jewish School, Momentum (formerly Jewish Women's Renaissance Project), Kohelet Yeshiva, and Aish Chaim of Philadelphia. But the Kohelet Foundation will discontinue operations for the foreseeable future. Its day school education work will be continued by The Jewish School.
Earlier in my academic career, I did research on the statistical natural language parsing problem, culminating in my thesis, entitled Natural Language Processing as Statistical Pattern Recognition. Here's a list of the rest of my publications.
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