Jorge Silva received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from IST Lisbon in 2007. He continued to be involved in academics as a senior research scientist at Duke University, where he applied statistical models to large-scale problems, e.g., unsupervised learning, analysis of multi-modal data, recommender systems and social networks. Since 2012 he is a Senior Research Statistician Developer at SAS, where he develops high-performance distributed machine learning algorithms for Enterprise Miner. He has filed two US patents and authored numerous articles in scholarly journals.