Hey there! I'm Shay Palachy-Afek, an independent data science consultant and VP DS @ LeO.

Community Projects: I have co-founded and co-manage, with Inbar Naor, DataHack, a non-profit / community / yearly hackathon dedicated to promoting data science and machine learning in Israel, and also runs projects such as DataTalks, DataNights and Kaggle-IL. I have also founded NLPH, a community meant to encourage and enable joint work on open NLP tools for Hebrew. See more at my community page on my personal website.

Work: I’ve been working as a strategic data science consultant in my own firm for the past several years, helping startups build and grow their data science operations, while covering all aspects of the trade, from technical and theoretical to the methodological (contact me by email for consulting). I’m also VP Data Science at LeO, an insurtech startup. Before that I have led data science work at Neura and then at ZenCity. Earlier, I worked as a developer at Intel and Ravello (now Oracle Cloud).

Blog posts & Talks: I often talk and write about my work, research interests and community activity. See more on my talks page and my blog page on my personal website.

Education: I’m currently finishing an MBA at the Coller School of Management at Tel Aviv University. I’ve have also completed my studies for a BSc (in computer science and philosopy) and an MSc in computer science at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (though I have never submitted my thesis). My research interests during that time included machine learning, NLP, dynamic network processes, block chain systems and other areas in both data science and game theory.

Open source code: On my spare time I have been creating some small open source tools. See more at my code page (I also write about my open source projects, occasionally) on my personal website.