How Hilary Mason '00 turns research into business solutions

Bitly grew up with the social web. Going on five years in operation, your favorite URL-shortener now sees tens of millions of links shared per day. Those links see hundreds of millions of clicks.

That's a ton of data--and it's the job of Hilary Mason, the New York company's chief scientist, to figure out what to do with it. Making useful things out of data sometimes requires what seems like an unexpected creative leap--the ability to see how a mandate for research on one track can turn into a product on another. In other words, data scientists solve business problems that aren't immediately apparent, turning research into something unexpected.

Technology, she's proclaimed, should give us super powers--and she's a prime example. Having studied computer science and algorithms at Brown and written the book on machine learning, she has also algorithmically uncovered the mediocrity of New York restaurants.

At Bitly, her job, as she describes it in her bio, is a mix of pure research, exploring, and engineering. "My role is chief scientist," says Mason. "What I really do is push potential forward."