We’re excited to introduce Rob Harrell, the newest member of our team. Rob joins us as our first Product Manager.
Rob has product experience in enterprise software, machine learning, and fintech. Prior to joining Fiddler, he was the product manager for Square's machine learning platform, where he oversaw the development of infrastructure and tools to host Square's variety of ML pipelines, ranging from high-scale real-time fraud detection and loan underwriting to customer analytics and marketing use cases. Prior to Square, Rob was the first product manager on Microsoft's Power Virtual Agents, a no-code tool for building chatbots incubated in Microsoft Research and launched under the Power Platform suite of products.
Rob is passionate about accelerating adoption of AI in a trustworthy, ethical manner. In his words:
"While managing Square’s machine learning platform, I saw first-hand all of the challenges organizations face attempting to apply ML to their businesses. To build a production-caliber model, teams first must hire an AI expert, discover the right business problem, track down and wrangle the appropriate data, and experiment until reaching a high level of performance. To then make use of that model in a production setting, teams must deploy it a hosting system that can replicate the data transformations used for training and serve and monitor predictions at scale. Often, when these systems produce unexpected or undesirable results, there isn’t an immediate explanation why.
On top of these challenges, regulatory and fairness risks with AI systems, and their potentially devastating consequences (including PR issues, regulatory probes, fines) loom like dark storm clouds over business decision makers attempting to leverage AI. Fortunately, there is an answer to these risks: Explainable AI. With Explainable AI, or the ability to understand to explain a model’s outputs with respect to its underlying data, businesses can better understand model behavior and guard themselves against regulatory and fairness risks. I couldn’t be more excited to join Fiddler to build the enterprise AI explainability engine and thus empower businesses to more confidently deploy and manage their AI systems. I hope that through explainability we will not only accelerate adoption AI of but also strengthen general trust and acceptance AI systems."