Giorgos Zacharia, Chief Scientist

Giorgos is the Chief Scientist of Kayak.com, responsible for algorithms, including personalization, search speed, and accuracy optimization.

Before Kayak, Giorgos was the Founder, CTO, and Chief Scientist of Open Ratings Inc. (ORI), which was acquired by D&B. At ORI, he led the development of supply base risk management solutions using predictive data mining, leading to the invention of the most accurate corporate bankruptcy analytics algorithms which provided the key value proposition for the company's product suite.

Giorgos is also the co-founder of two machine learning-driven hedge funds, Stocknomics Ltd, and Emporics Capital Management. LLC, the co-founder and president of the Cyprus Entrepreneurship Competition, run by the University of Cyprus, and a co-founder of Kypros-Net, Inc, a portal on Cyprus, with a collaborative learning community of more than 120,000 active users learning Modern Greek.

Giorgos, who has won five medals in International Mathematical and Physics Olympiads, holds a PhD in Computer Science, and three more degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from MIT, where he was a Fulbright Scholar, and Telecom Italia Fellow. Giorgos has authored several academic publications, and three US patents on algorithms still used by ORI for its analytics.

Before MIT, Giorgos served as an artillery sergeant in the Cyprus National Guard, commanding a surface-to-air missile system squad.

Giorgos loves finding value in data, large or sparse, and Kayak has tons of very valuable data.