H E A D I N G
OUTDOORS
Besides scaling its
internal climbing wall,
IBM researcher Svenja
Mauthe leads trips
into the mountains:
“It helps you reassess
problems and
find new solutions.”ENCOURAGING
PLAYTIME
Eilish O’Hagan works
at Wilmington PLC, a
publishing firm in
London, which gave
out bubble-blowing
kits. “We ended up
using them as a kind
of fun team activity.”S P A C E S T H A T
INSPIRE
Slava Polonski, a UX
researcher in Google’s
Zurich office, likes to
hold meetings while
playing pool: “We can
also jam with musical
instruments and play
in rooms full of LEGO.”P E T
THERAPY
To beat stress, James
Williams, celebrity
producer at GQ, takes
his dog to work: “he
makes me smile and
realise that what I’m
stressing over isn’t
the be-all and end-all.”GETTING
HANDS-ON
American PR giant
Edelman offers all its
employees subsidised
twice-weekly
stress-busting back
massages. They’re so
popular, they’re booked
far in advance. WBtrained, it was really unusual for
someone to do both [data and decision
science],” she says. “I remember
college advisers telling me I was crazy
with my list of courses, and why on
earth would I want to [study] these
completely different things that had
nothing to do with one another.”
Kozyrkov first thought that she
would become a university professor.
But a chance meeting with a data
scientist at Google led to a summer
internship at the company, followed
by jobs as a statistician and machine-
learning expert. After a stint as Google
Cloud’s chief data scientist, she took
on the role of chief decision scientist
for the whole company in 2018.
What she does is to bridge depart-
ments that usually keep to themselves,
all the way from research to the teams
that apply algorithms to business
functions – training more than 17,000
Google staff in the process.
“Typical data science training might
teach you how to analyse survey data,
but not how to design the survey in
the first place. If the survey is poorly
designed, no amount of maths can
help,” she says. Kozrykov wants to use
applied data science, AI and analytics
to create better tools and products – a
discipline that she calls decision intel-
ligence. In real life, it means letting
“well thought-out projects flourish, as
well as identifying ill-advised projects
so these can be shut down before they
begin”. And, by bringing psychology
into data science, she hopes to reduce
bias in algorithms. “You need a really
big diversity of skills and perspectives
on any of these projects,” she says. “In
applied machine learning, it’s a terrible
idea to get multiple carbon copies of the
same worker... It’s really hard to think
of everything alone. Diversity helps
creativity flourish.” Emma SheppardPHOTOGRAPHY: DAN BURN-FORTI. ILLUSTRATION: CRAIG BAXTER; SODAVEKT081 OFFICE PERKSWORKING ON YOURWELLBEINGFirms are finding creative ways of
keeping workers happy and productiveCASSIE KOZYRKOV
CHIEF DECISION SCIENTIST. GOOGLEYOU NEED A REALLY BIG
DIVERSITY OF SKILLS
AND PERSPECTIVES ON
ANY PROJECT’‘11-19-WSCassie.indd 81 16/09/2019 09:38