Usama Fayyad

Biography

Usama Fayyad is the SVP for AI and data strategy and senior advisor to the president, and a professor of the practice in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. He joined Northeastern University in 2020 as the Inaugural Director of the Institute for Experiential AI and helped found the Institute from 2021-2025.  He continues to serve as chairman of Open Insights, a company he founded as a technology and consulting firm in 2008 to enable enterprises to extract greater value from their data assets as enablers of AI. He co-founded OODA Health, Inc., and from 2017 to 2019 served as the company’s chief technology officer. Between 2013 and 2016 he was global chief data officer and group managing director at Barclays Bank in London. After leadership roles at NASA’s JPL where he founded the Machine Learning Systems Group in 1992, he founded the Data Mining & Exploration Group at Microsoft Research in 1997, and after launching two startups in Seattle, his second startup was acquired by Yahoo! in 2003 where he became the industry’s first Chief Data Officer and founded the Strategic Data Solutions division at Yahoo!    

He has published more than 100 technical articles on data science, holds over 20 patents, and is a fellow of both the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Association for Computing Machinery. He has also edited two influential books on data science and served as founding editor-in-chief on two key journals. He serves on public and private company boards and served on the advisory board of the WEF Global Center for Cybersecurity. Fayyad is an active angel investor/advisor in many early-stage tech startups across the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East. He holds two BSE’s in Electrical and Computer Engineering, MSE in Computer Engineering, MS.c. in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Contact

Usama Fayyad
u.fayyad@northeastern.edu

Rana Al-Shami
Executive Assistant
r.alshami@northeastern.edu