Meet the man who can get machines to make human decisions: Amr Awadallah is “the geek from Egypt who’s ruling the roost in the big data world” with his data analytics company Cloudera, says Alok Soni in a profile for the India-based YourStory. The piece trails Awadallah’s journey from a Cairo University engineering professor to his entrepreneurial success in the California tech industry during the height of the internet bubble. What started out as a shopping comparison service for books through data aggregation and analytics spawned the now USD 2.5 bn listed-company Cloudera.

Co-founded with his business partner Thai Tran, Cloudera specializes in “consensus-driven decision making” and hopes to one day “enable this wave of automation of decisions that will change finance, insurance, governance, smart cities, and how we all live.” (Photo via Vertex Ventures)

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