The VTS team consists of folks with a diverse set of personalities, talents, and perspectives, and we want you to meet them! That’s why we’ve created this #WeAreVTS blog series to highlight some of the many outstanding people we have at VTS, get a closer look at the dynamic lives they have, and continue to create an environment where each VTSer can be their authentic self.
Without further ado, here's our interview with Carlo Bailey, Senior Manager of Data Science!
In a sentence or two, can you explain what you do here at VTS?
Hi Louisa! I lead the Data Platform and AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning) Squads at VTS. They are two squads consisting of Data, Machine Learning, and Software Engineers.
The Data Platform team owns all things data, from ingestion and storage to transformation and reporting. We support all self-serve analytics and reporting needs across the organization for both go-to-market, product, and operations functions.
The AI and ML squad owns all our machine learning models and AI initiatives. To date, the ML focus has been on data automation and entity disambiguation at scale - ensuring our data is complete, accurate, and trustworthy. We are also currently working on enabling platform capabilities to do generative AI across the organization.
Where are you based right now?
I’m based in Brooklyn, New York.
Can you describe your professional journey and how it led you to VTS?
Interestingly enough, my educational background spans Architecture, Urban Planning, and Computational Data Science. I originally went to grad school to study Architecture and Urban Planning - but throughout my studies, I fell in love with a very niche part of the industry involved in the study of geospatial data and urban analytics. One of my final papers was borrowing techniques from network science (shortest path algorithms) to optimize route planning for agricultural products.
This algorithmic jaunt led me to WeWork’s Data and Research team, where the focus was on understanding the relationship between people and place at the scale of buildings. My team and I built multiple ML models to predict occupancy and how WeWork members use the spaces.
From there, I joined several startups - some big and some small - in various data roles. One role I had was at Topos, an AI company where they were using ML to understand the relationship between people and place at a city scale - taking it a leap further from what I was doing at WeWork.
Eventually I landed at VTS, which felt like a natural fit! VTS being a CRE company, building software for a physical product (buildings), and being able to work on problems in the data science space. Joining the team here just made sense to me.
What excites you about what you do at VTS? Is there a moment in your time here that made you especially proud to work at VTS?
What excites me about working at VTS comes from a mixture of the people I work with, as well as the challenges and autonomy I get to exercise.
I get to work with a passionate and talented group of peers who are excited to tackle hard problems in creative ways which helps keep me excited about our work.
Also, having access to the unique, first party data that no one else has and having the autonomy and agency to experiment and build machine learning algorithms end-to-end is something you can only do in a company at this scale and with the type of data we have.
It’s really rewarding when I get to speak to a customer and see how our products help them solve problems in the real world, and the scale at which they do that. Some of our customers are very large institutional investors - seeing that our product is a “need to have" and that our data is something that is incredibly valuable to them makes me very proud of the work we do.
On to more personal topics - what was your dream job growing up?
I watched David Attenborough shows religiously as a kid; I think my earliest dream job involved studying animals, perhaps as a marine biologist. I liked the mixture of travel, science, and research. It was either that, or drawing comic books for a living.
What do you like to do in your free time? Any hobbies?
I cycle quite a bit, and I go on long distance rides. I like to take the Empire State Trail which goes from Lower Manhattan all the way up to Canada, as well as the Palisades in New Jersey.
I also love to cook and watch football/soccer.
As for cooking, my go-to dishes include stews, or if I want to make a more elaborate meal, it would be ginger garlic short ribs with a cucumber sesame salad.
If you could wave a magic wand to solve any problem in the world, what would it be?
I would wave a magic wand to repopulate the extinct or close-to-extinct species (plants and animals) - bringing back more of the biodiversity to the planet.
What’s your advice for someone who wants to be in a role similar to yours?
To me, what makes a successful Data Scientist and ML Practitioner, is an innate curiosity and investigative mind. Someone who gets very obsessive about a problem, then iterates and thinks outside of the box across domains to solve those problems.
This type of work takes a lot of iterative problem-solving, and the most successful people are those who think about a particular question or problem over the evenings and weekends and take the time to be a detective and sift through data to find the “golden nugget” that we’re looking for. That really comes from having a passion for what you're doing and having that curiosity to continue digging to try different methods to find what you’re looking for.
