Khalifeh AlJadda holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Georgia (UGA), with a specialization in machine learning. He has experience implementing large-scale, distributed machine learning algorithms to solve challenging problems in domains ranging from Bioinformatics to search and recommendation engines. He is the Director of Core Data Science at Home Depot, which is the largest home improvement company in the world. He is currently leading the recommendation data science team, Search Data Science team, and Visual AIteam.Before joining Home Depot he was leading the data science R&D organization at CareerBuilderwhere he led the initiative to design and implement the backend of CareerBuilder’s language-agnostic semantic search engine leveraging NLP, Apache Spark, and the Hadoop ecosystem. He also led the team on building a new AI-based recommendation engine using cutting-edge technologies. Khalifeh is the founder and organizer of the Southern Data Science Conference(https://www.southerndatascience.com) which is the major data science conference in Atlanta that aims to promote data science in the Southeast region. He also co-founded a non-profit organization ATLytiCS (www.atlytics.org) Also, Khalifeh is a frequent public speaker on topics related to data science, machine learning, semantic search, and big data analytics.