Winton Davies, PhD

After an undergrad in Comp Sci from Reading University in England, Winton began his career as a DEC software engineer working on ALL-IN-1, the most successful office automation suite of the 1980s. He integrated an experimental rule-based email filtering from MIT into the product, and this led him to go back to school for a Master’s in artificial intelligence and PhD in machine learning from Aberdeen University, Scotland.

After a post-doc research engineering post at Stanford, he moved into the world of startups, first at the original Search Ads company GoTo, eventually acquired by Yahoo and then at the social Q&A search engine Aardvark, quickly acquired by Google. At Google he was responsible for the quality of the long tail of the search index for almost a decade.

Winton lives in San Francisco with his wife and son.