Debora Donato
Debora Donato is a highly accomplished data science and engineering leader with a remarkable 14 years of experience in data science and machine learning, and seven years managing cross-functional teams. With her analytical approach, Debora drives key strategic decisions, defining product strategy, and developing a quarterly roadmap. Her ability to meet short-term goals has had a measurable impact of over 30% on new user retention and 20% on WAU/MAU, thus indicating her deep understanding of product development in the digital space.
Throughout her career, Debora has recruited highly skilled engineers and research scientists and mentored data scientists and research engineers who have developed an NSFW classifier, low-quality self-promoters scoring model, and content quality ranker. These models have reduced user reports by 66%.
Debora's expertise in the field of data analytics and data science has led her to publish over 45 articles in various international journals and conferences, covering topics in information retrieval, web mining, social networks analysis, and complex networks. She co-invented 14 patents during her time in the field of data analytics and data sciences.
Donato studied Maturitá classica at Liceo Classico Anco Marzio, completed her Degree in Electronic Engineering from the Università degli Studi di Roma 'La Sapienza,' and her Ph.D., Computer Science Engineering, and published a thesis in Sapienza Università di Roma, Dipartimento Di Informatica e Sistemistica. She also holds an MBA degree from The Wharton School.
Donato has held several esteemed positions in her career, including the role of Sr Director, Product Analytics & Data Science Discovery at Ancestry, Director of Product Analytics, Data Strategy Advisor at Self-Employed, VP of content discovery, and R&D at Mix.com, Senior Data Scientist at Yahoo! Labs, and Researcher at Yahoo Research.