Irina Kukuyeva, PhD
AI Diligence | Venture Partner at Kukuyeva Consulting
Dr. Irina Kukuyeva is a business operations-focused technology leader who helps companies understand and unlock customer behavior and feedback loops to build scalable, profitable companies with market fit. She has collaborated with over 100 companies and is a frequent speaker on the topic of building and scaling companies with product-led growth and AI.
She’s invented and implemented algorithms on a global scale, led global data and AI teams, and taught graduate students best practices for developing real-time AI algorithms.
Irina mentors over 100 start-ups a year at many accelerators, including Techstars, the Founder Institute, and the UCLA Venture Accelerator. She is an advisory board member for a pediatric MedTech accelerator (CTIP) and the UCLA Master of Data Science program.
She holds a PhD in Statistics from UCLA, where she invented a novel image compression algorithm for her PhD thesis -- and found similarities between two storms on Jupiter, a finding confirmed by NASA Juno's mission years later. It is now a special case of the many popular AI models today.
Sessions
Tell me What you Want, What you Really, Really Want: How to Identify the Real Business Question
Believe it or not, data practitioners get hired to answer business questions. But what is a business question? What does it look like in practice? And how can you make sure that you're on the same page as your stakeholders about the end result of collaboration? This talk will present frameworks to help you understand and uncover your stakeholder’s business question so you can deliver an actionable data product.