Nextdoor AI Leads

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  Qi He

  Head of AI

  Qi He is the Head of AI at Nextdoor, leading 3 groups of talents in Machine Learning, Data Science and Data Platform for accelerating the cultivation of a kinder world with data-driven intelligence. His org directly drives unique personalized neighborhood and customer experiences by developing advanced ML and generative AI technologies, conducting rigorous data science research and analytics, building comprehensive local knowledge graphs, and establishing reliable and flexible data and ML platforms.

  Qi is a technical leader in AI and its business applications, with a track record of 20 years of experience leading and executing large complex AI projects, as well as innovating and constructing necessary AI technologies to achieve business impacts. He serves as a Steering Committee member of ACM CIKM and an advisory board member of Neurocomputing Journal. He held many editorial and conference chair positions, including Associate Editor of IEEE TKDE and Neurocomputing Journal, General Chair of CIKM 2013, and PC Chair of CIKM 2019, while also served as a (senior) program committee member of SIGKDD, SIGIR, WWW, CIKM, and WSDM for over a decade. Qi has published over 70 papers and patents with over 7000 citations to date. He received the 2008 ACM SIGKDD Best Application Paper Award and the 2020 ACM WSDM 10-year Test of Time Award. Qi is an ACM Distinguished Member and was featured as the People of ACM in February 2021.
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  Carly Villareal

  Head of Data Science & Analytics

  Carly Villareal was one of the first people to work on data at Nextdoor. Since she joined the company in 2015, she’s worked on building the foundations for data at the company, including developing the first content ranking system, working on some of our earliest ETLs, and building out the DS&A team across different disciplines and specialties. She’s excited to continue to use data to invest in all the local communities that use Nextdoor. Previously, she has worked in predictive natural catastrophe loss modeling and in consulting.
  
  Outside of work, she lives in the Noe Valley neighborhood of San Francisco and is an avid hiker and skier. She is a former NCAA rowing champion, and she can’t leave a bookstore without buying something. She holds a B.S. in Geological Science and an M.S. in Management Science & Engineering, both from Stanford University.

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  Tiger Zhang

  Head of Machine Learning

  Tiger joined Nextdoor in March 2022. Prior to that, he has been building systems and applications of catalog classification, merchandise recommendations, social commerce, B2C/B2B predictive modeling, and knowledge graph at eBay and LinkedIn since 2006. He is passionate about innovation with 40+ filed US patents and 20+ being issued. Tiger is an inspirational engineering leader with 5+ years of experiences in building highly performing teams including a remote team in Dublin from scratch. 

  Tiger lives in South Bay and is an avid fan of sports (badminton, basketball, and soccer). He holds a Ph.D in Computer Science from Dalhousie University, Canada.

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  Zack Shapiro

  Head of Data Platform

  Zack Shapiro has been developing software and leading software engineers in Silicon Valley for over 20 years.  His love of working with big datasets and distributed computing began in 2007 while building an ad server, serving over 4 billion impressions a day.  Since joining Nextdoor in 2015 Zack and his team have built out the Data Lake, Bridge, PII Processing, Database synchronization and a slew of other features to enable teams across the company work freely with Nextdoor’s more valuable asset.

  Zack lives in Alameda, CA with his wife and two kids where he enjoys cycling, photography, and watching his kids play baseball.  He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Oberlin College.

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  Jaewon Yang

  Sr. AI Architect

  Jaewon Yang is a Sr. AI Architect at Nextdoor, designing AI models and systems to power Nextdoor’s search and recommendation products. Prior to Nextdoor, he has developed deep learning models for Social Network Analysis, Natural Language Processing and Knowledge Graph at LinkedIn and Stanford University for 15+ years.

  Jaewon obtained a Ph.D in Machine Learning and a Master in Statistics at Stanford Infolab. He has regularly served on the program committee of SIGKDD, WSDM, WWW and CIKM for 10+ years. He received the SIGKDD doctoral dissertation award, the WSDM test-of-time award, the ICDM KAIS journal test-of-time award and the ICDM best paper award. He has published 40+ publications with 7000+ citations.

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  Danny Shacham

  Sr. AI Architect

  Danny is an expert in machine learning, ontologies, knowledge graph, data modeling and their different variations in i18n languages. Prior to Nextdoor, Danny was leading efforts to build LinkedIn’s Knowledge Graph, ranging from innovative changes to LinkedIn’s understanding of its members and jobs, to a more accurate, deep and relevant knowledge representation, through helping machines to structure that knowledge in more systematic ways to foundational improvements to the systems surrounding data processing.

  Danny is passionate about data and innovation and has more than 10 US patents in the field.

  Danny lives in Israel with his wife and four kids where he enjoys hiking and some safe, but extreme activities such as canyoneering and skiing. He holds a MSc in Computer Science in the area of Natural Language Processing.