Dr. Michael Bowles (Mike) holds a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering, an ScD in instrumentation and an MBA. He has worked in academia, technology and business. Mike currently works with startup companies where machine learning is integral to success. He serves variously as part of the management team, a consultant or advisor. He also teaches machine learning courses at Hacker Dojo, a co-working space and startup incubator Mountain View, Calif.
Mike was born in Oklahoma and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees there. After working as a construction engineer in Southeast Asia went to Cambridge for ScD and C. Stark Draper Chair at MIT after graduation. Mike left Boston to work on communications satellites at Hughes Aircraft company in Southern California. After completing an MBA at UCLA, Mike moved to the San Francisco bay area to accept positions as founder and CEO of two successful venture-backed startups.
Mike plays an active role in technical and startup-related work. Recent projects include the use of machine learning in automated trading, predicting biological outcomes on the basis of genetic information, natural language processing for website optimization, predicting patient outcomes from demograpic and lab data technology evaluations as part of financial due diligence on companies in the machine learning and big data arena.
Mike takes different roles depending on the requirements. Sometimes he plays a general consulting role or takes on specific technical or management consulting projects. He serves on advisory boards for some startup companies. In a few cases, Mike takes a managerial role with the company.
Mike teaches classes in machine learning to working professionals in Silicon Valley and across the country. He teaches courses at Hacker Dojo in Mountain View on such topics as basic machine learning, recommender systems, natural language processing, neural nets and deep belief networks and adapting machine learning algorithms to big data sets. In addition Mike delivers custom designed courses onsite for corporations wanting to educate their staff in modern data science.
