Max Sklar, Machine Learning Engineer, Foursquare

Max Sklar is an engineer and a machine learning specialist.  At Foursquare, his objective is to constantly make the application smarter and more interesting for users.  Among these projects is improving Explore, which is Foursquare’s social recommendation system.

His passion for recommender systems have led him to study how to make inferences with sparse information, and how to quantify uncertainty.  This has lead to an interest in Bayesian methods in order to put a little common sense and intuition into data-based predictions.

Prior to his position at Foursquare, Max contributed to the emerging location-based social space with the creation of Stickymap, which was a website that encouraged users to annotate a map with knowledge of their neighborhood.

As an Adjunct Instructor at NYU, Max enjoys sharing his views on technology and computer science  and sparking dialogue with the next generation of engineers. As an undergraduate, he was also a talk radio host on Yale Radio.  Max holds an M.S. in Information Systems from NYU, and a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale.