Andrew Aday

Last summer, Andrew worked as a software engineer on Twitter’s Power Advertiser Experience (PAEX) team in San Francisco, doing backend infrastructure work on Twitter’s Ads API and async analytics pipeline. His major project was a real-time framework for inspecting API endpoints and auto-generating documentation (currently in production at https://dev.twitter.com/ads/reference).

During his freshman year, Andrew conducted research at Columbia’s Software Systems Laboratory under Professor Junfeng Yang. He was third author on a paper titled “Active Machine Unlearning,” where he designed and implemented a clustering algorithm that identifies and unlearns malicious data from a compromised learning system. Using data from the Enron and SpamAssasin email corpuses, the unlearning algorithm was tested on naive Bayes classifiers and SVMs that had been compromised via various malicious data injection methods (intentional mislabeling, dictionary attacks, etc). Results were very positive, as the active unlearning algorithm was able to restore these systems to a detection rate even higher than before being compromised, as it unlearned both injected malicious data and “noisy” data.

In the summer of 2015, Andrew also conducted research under Professor Yang on a paper investigating concurrency attacks: a new generation of security exploits that capitalize on errors within multithreaded programs.

Prior to doing research, Andrew acquired a majority of his CS experience while working at tech startups. Most recently, he worked at Cassia Networks, an internet-of-things company, to create a logic engine that learns user behavior patterns to intelligently control household devices. Andrew was formerly the CTO and cofounder of PersonaBase, a recruitment platform that used machine learning and research in team dynamics to augment the hiring process. In the summer of 2014, PersonaBase received an LOI from the Chief Human Resources Officer of Hyatt Hotels to pilot their product.

In his spare time Andrew enjoys watching films and concerts in the city. He plans to study abroad during his spring semester in 2017.