Lorien Pratt

When I was a little girl, I once spent a week pulling apart a telephone, down to the nuts and bolts. My mom was worried this might be dangerous, so she called the phone company. The agent said "no worries, but if she puts it back together, tell her to come and apply for a job."

These days, I still enjoy understanding how things work, and my favorite "disassembly" tools come from data analysis and machine learning. But, more importantly, I've learned to put things back together. And this has taught me an important lesson: it's how the pieces work together in an integrated system that really matters, not what they do when apart.

I invented a subfield of machine learning called inductive transfer, and helped to pioneer decision intelligence.

I lead small and large machine learning and decision intelligence projects worldwide. I would love to hear from you.