Mahdi Namazifar is currently a Senior Data Scientist with Talos team of Cisco Systems' San Francisco Innovation Center (SFIC). He graduated his PhD in Operations Research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011. His PhD work was on theoretical and computational aspects of mathematical optimization. During his PhD Mahdi was also affiliated with Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (WID) and the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA). Also he was a National Science Foundation (NFS) Grantee at the San Diego Supercomputer Center in 2007 and a Research Intern at IBM T.J. Watson Research Lab in 2008. After graduate school and before his current position at Cisco he was a Scientist at Opera Solutions working on applications of machine learning in a variety of problems coming from industries such as healthcare and finance.