Andy Twigg

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Andy Twigg

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about me

I’m a computer scientist specializing in big data and machine learning. I’ve been founder/CTO of 2 startups in the big data/ML space, both acquired – Acunu was acquired by a big tech company, and C9 was acquired by Insidesales.com). I did my PhD in graph algorithms at Cambridge University in 2006, and I was a Fellow in Computer Science at St Johns College, Oxford from 2008-13.

I’m currently leading ML efforts at lacework, a cloud security startup. We collect billions of messages per hour from machines and logs, and use a variety of techniques including self-supervised graph representation learning and anomaly detection.

experience

2020-present Distinguished Engineer, Lacework

I work on ML and large-scale data processing efforts at Lacework, a cloud security startup trying to treat cloud security as a big data problem. We collect billions of messages per hour from agents and cloud data sources, and use a variety of techniques including unsupervised graph representation learning and anomaly detection. We raised ~$1.9B with a valuation of over ~$8B.

2018-2020 Entrepreneur in residence, Milliways/Rocketship.vc

I was an EIR, exploring ideas around deep RL. One project was to use RL to learn how to trade with L3 data. We build a full simulator on L3 data with several TBs from a large crypto exchange. This enabled us to do per-tick book reconstruction for better queue length estimation, etc.

2014-17 Chief Scientist, Insidesales.com and CTO, C9 (acquired by Insidesales.com)

I was CTO at C9, we were one of the first companies to apply deep ML to problems in sales data, including forecasting and opportunity scoring. Acquired by Insidesales.com, where I was Chief Scientist until 2017. We grew to over 800 people and raised over $250m in funding.

2013 Founder, Featurestream.io

I built a novel streaming, distributed random forest implementation on spark streaming and experimented with offering it as a hosted API service. I did a writeup about the streaming random forest algorithm and the code can be found here.

2009-12 CTO & cofounder, Acunu (acquired)

I was founder+CTO at Acunu, where we worked on new approaches to write-optimized materialized views for big data, and built a big data analytics system on top of Cassandra. Acquired by a large tech company.

2008-13 Oxford CS Department & Fellow, St. John’s College, Oxford

Research interests: efficient algorithms for data mining via approximation, streaming, machine learning. Took a sabattical to found Acunu.

You can find more info in my linkedin profile and resume, and you can contact me at andy[at]atwigg[dot]com

selected publications