Overview

Gender

male

Investor Type

Angel

Allen is the Principal Data Scientist at MapR Technologies, where he leads interdisciplinary teams to deliver results in fast-paced, high-pressure environments across several industry verticals. Previously, Allen founded TinyTube Networks which provided the first mobile video discovery and transcoding proxy service, and Ion Flux which provided a medical-grade, cloud-based human genome sequencing service.

Allen holds a PhD in Human Genetics from the School of Medicine at UCLA. His dissertation project was to create the largest public data warehouse for gene expression data.
Key components of the project included: operationalizing code beyond the research stage; building and operating a high-performance computing cluster for scale-out; and design and implementation of a schema that supported fast matrix operations for ontology- and graph-based machine learning algorithms.

Allen has contributed to a wide variety of open source projects: R (CRAN, Bioconductor), Perl (CPAN, BioPerl), FFmpeg, Cascading, Apache HBase, Apache Storm, and Apache Mahout. Overall, his unique background combines deep technical expertise in data science with a pragmatic understanding of real-world problems. He also pursues interests in linguistics and economics, and — if it hadn’t been obvious — he performs magic.