Lukas Biewald

Lukas Biewald (born 1981 in Massachusetts) is an entrepreneur living in San Francisco, California. Biewald was the co-founder and CEO of Figure Eight Inc. (formerly CrowdFlower) which he co-founded in December 2007 with Chris Van Pelt.[1] In 2019, Biewald sold Figure Eight to Appen for 300 million dollars.[2]

Lukas Biewald
Biewald speaking at PopTech 2011.
Born1981 (age 41–42)
Alma materStanford University

In 2018, Biewald co-founded Weights & Biases, an AI developer platform that creates developer tools for machine learning,[3] with Chris Van Pelt and Shawn Lewis.[4] He is also the host of Gradient Dissent, a machine learning podcast.

Early Life

As a child, Biewald was a fan of watching PBS science documentaries. He was drawn in and fascinated by the potential of AI and its ability to create and replicate human behavior with technology. In an interview, he noted: "The idea that computers could learn to do things on their own just seemed amazing to me. It always kind of felt like humanity’s last project."[5]

Education

Biewald holds a B.S. in Mathematics and an M.S. in Computer Science from Standford University.[6] He was also a research assistant in Daphne Koller's group in the Stanford AI Lab.

Career

Prior to co-founding Figure Eight, Biewald was a Senior Scientist and Manager within the Ranking and Management Team at Powerset, a natural language search technology company later acquired by Microsoft.

From 2005 to 2006, Biewald led the Search Relevance Team for Yahoo! Japan, where he focused on using statistical machine learning approaches to improve the web search ranking function for international markets.

Awards and honors

In 2010, he won the Netexplorateur Prize[7] for creating the GiveWork iPhone app,[8] which allows users to perform small tasks that assist refugees and people in developing countries. Later that year, Inc. Magazine included Biewald and Van Pelt on its list of the Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30.[9]

Biewald and Van Pelt launched CrowdFlower as a product of Dolores Labs at TechCrunch50[10] in 2009, where the company placed as a finalist.

He is the author of several academic papers[11][12][13] on applications of crowdsourcing, as well as a chapter on crowdsourcing gender and age stereotypes[14] in O'Reilly Media's Beautiful Data that he co-authored with Brendan O'Connor.

Academic life

Biewald holds an MS in Computer Science and a BS in Mathematics from Stanford University.

While pursuing his Master's in Computer Science at Stanford University, Biewald won the California Institute of Technology Turing Tournament.[15]

Media appearances

Biewald appeared in an episode of Hidden in Plain Sight entitled "Deep Learning is Eating the World",[16] where he discussed software evolution and the effect of machine learning on humanity.

References
  1. Barret, Victoria (11 March 2009). "Dolores Labs Vets Web Sites On The Cheap". Forbes. Retrieved 16 April 2011.
  2. Ha, Anthony. "Appen acquires Figure Eight for up to $300M, bringing two data annotation companies together".
  3. Ha, Anthony. "Weights & Biases raises $5M to build development tools for machine learning".
  4. D'Onfro, Jillian (2023-09-21). "How Lukas Biewald grew Weights & Biases from a side project to the AI revolution's must-use service". Insight Partners. Retrieved 2023-10-20.
  5. D'Onfro, Jillian (2023-09-21). "How Lukas Biewald grew Weights & Biases from a side project to the AI revolution's must-use service". Insight Partners. Retrieved 2023-10-27.
  6. Biewald, Lukas (October 27, 2023). "Lukas Biewald". LinkedIn. Retrieved October 27, 2023.
  7. "Lukas BIEWALD / Add value to the world". Netexplorateur. 4 May 2010. Retrieved 17 April 2011.
  8. "GiveWork - Dolores Labs - platform iOS 3.0 - version 1.1". iTunes. 3 February 2010.
  9. Lagorio, Christine (19 July 2010). "Lukas Biewald and Chris Van Pelt, Founders of Crowdflower". Inc. Magazine. Retrieved 17 April 2011.
  10. "The TechCrunch50 Finalists 2009". TechCrunch. Retrieved 17 April 2011.
  11. Biewald, Lukas (2010). "Massive multiplayer human computation for fun, money, and survival". XRDS: Crossroads, the ACM Magazine for Students. 17 (2): 10–15. doi:10.1145/1869086.1869093. S2CID 11144147. Retrieved 16 April 2011.
  12. "Scalable crisis relief: Crowdsourced SMS translation and categorization with Mission 4636" (PDF). ACM DEV ’10. Archived from the original (PDF) on 6 February 2011. Retrieved 16 April 2011.
  13. "Ensuring quality in crowdsourced search relevance evaluation: The effects of training question distribution" (PDF). SIGIR ’10. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 December 2010. Retrieved 16 April 2011.
  14. Beautiful Data. O'Reilly Media. 2009. p. 384. ISBN 978-0-596-15711-1.
  15. Archived November 20, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
  16. "Deep Learning is Eating the World"
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