Power of Place

Akshay is foursquare’s Platform Evangelist. Before joining foursquare, Akshay spent more than five years at Google working as an engineer on Real-time Search, Blogger, and Blog Search. He is the creator of a small, but growing, group chat system called Partychat. Akshay has bachelors’ degrees in computer science and mathematics and a master’s degree in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He lives in Brooklyn with his fiancée and his broken autonomous vacuum cleaner.

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Andrew Hogue is the Head of Search at foursquare, where he is responsible for big data applications like Explore and Radar. Prior to foursquare, he spent seven years at Google where he led the Structured Data team, working on applications like question answering, sentiment analysis, and local search. Andrew has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science from MIT, where he worked on pattern recognition and machine learning. He holds several foursquare mayorships in New Jersey, where he lives with his wife and three children.

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Ben Lee works on foursquare’s recommendations engine. Prior to foursquare, he spent four years working on Web Search Features at Google. Ben has a Ph.D from UCSB where he worked on applied machine learning and a bachelor’s in computer engineering from Caltech.