[j2kun]

I'm a PhD student in pure mathematics (studying theoretical computer science), and I have a list of industry companies I might want to work at in the event I don't get a satisfactory post-doc.

To what extent do the folks at Ayasdi engage in the research side of the picture? Would you be interested in hiring someone with both strong programming skills and mathematical knowhow to work on both the research and development sides?

[jlewis_st]

Definitely — our R&D team works on developing new mathematical approaches (for example, how to best leverage TDA for classification problems) and also applying existing approaches to new problem domains. The team also does plenty of prototyping (coding) and then works with engineering to move new algorithms to production. Drop me a line and I can put you in touch with someone who can talk in depth about what we're up to on the research side.

[abak]

I'm in the research group at Ayasdi and can say that we actively do research in both TDA and Machine Learning and have developed unpublished but cutting edge fusion between the two fields - using TDA to enhance traditional machine learning models (not yet released in public).

I regularly attend academic conferences, give university colloquia and also talk at industry events (eg. In the last month I gave two workshop sessions at ICML in Beijing, gave a lecture at a drug design conference in NJ and presented at a Big Data conference in NYC).

We do basic research but as a small company (and small group) we have to keep our eyes on the commercial application and financial implications of our work. For myself I've found this environment stimulating and if anything has helped my research productivity.

It's worth pointing out that Gunnar Carlsson - who is mentioned in the article - is both one of the inventors of TDA and someone who participates in the daily development of the company and product. We have an open seating plan and he currently sits diagonally to my desk and next to one of our most junior employees (not in the research group). In that sense, there's opportunity for people to step up as they desire with access to people who aren't just leaders in TDA, but who invented it.

As a company we consider someone like yourself in a variety of roles - Data Science, Research or Engineering. In all of those groups people develop novel techniques that could be qualified as "research" and all groups contain people with PhD's in technical fields - some coming straight out of grad schools, some after postdocs and some after holding faculty positions. We are broadminded regarding academic backgrounds and there are people with undergraduate degrees making novel contributions as well. One of our presales engineers (who has a PhD) just had a paper published in Nature - which I mention to show how we have research capabilities spread very broadly through the organization.

If you want to talk more feel free to reach out to me.

[j2kun]

Sounds great! I actually met Gunnar briefly at a conference at UChicago two years ago (doubt he remembers me). I'll reach out to you on LinkedIn.