Usama Fayyad

Founder & Chairman

Open Insights

Usama founded Open Insights as a technology and consulting firm in 2008 after leaving Yahoo! to
enable enterprises to get value out of their data assets and optimize or create new business
models based on the new evolving economy of interactions. Leveraging both technology and
strategic consulting Open Insights deploys data-driven solutions to grow revenue from Data assets
through BigData strategy, new business models on data assets, and deploying data science, AI/ML
solutions. Usama is also Co-Founder & CTO at OODA Health, Inc a VC-funded company aiming to
liberate the healthcare system from administrative waste by leveraging AI/automation to create
real-time/retail-like experience in payments in healthcare.

From 2013-2016 Usama served as Global Chief Data Officer & Group Managing Director at
Barclays Bank in London, after launching the largest tech startup accelerator in MENA following his
appointment as Executive Chairman of Oasis500 in Jordan by King Abdullah II in 2010. His
background includes Chairman and CEO roles at several startups, including Blue Kangaroo Corp,
DMX Group and digiMine Inc.

He was the first person to hold the Chief Data Officer title when Yahoo! acquired his second startup
in 2004. At Yahoo! he built the Strategic Data Solutions group and founded Yahoo! Research Labs
where much of the early work on BigData made it to open source and led to Hadoop and other
open source contributions. He has held leadership roles at Microsoft (1996-2000) and founded the
Machine Learning Systems group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (1989-2005), where his
work on machine learning resulted in the top Excellence in Research award from Caltech, and a
U.S. Government medal from NASA.

Usama has published over 100 technical articles on data mining, data science, AI/ML, and
databases. He holds over 30 patents and is a Fellow of both the AAAI and the ACM. Usama earned
his Ph.D. in Engineering in AI/Machine Learning from the University of Michigan. Ann Arbor. He has
edited two influential books on data mining/data science and served as editor-in-chief on two key
industry journals. He also served on the boards/advisory boards of private and public companies
including: Criteo, Invensense, Exelate, RapidMiner, Stella.AI, Virsec, Silniva, Abe.AI, NetSeer,
Choicestream, Medio, and others. He is on advisory boards of the Data Science Institute at
Imperial College, AAI at UTS, and The University of Michigan College of Engineering National
Advisory Board. He serves on the Board Advisory Committee to Nationwide Building Society in the
UK and on the Advisory board of the WEF Global Center for Cybersecurity. He is an active angel
investor and advisor in many early-stage tech startups across the U.S., Europe and the Middle
East.

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