Juan Miguel Lavista

Juan Miguel Lavista Ferres is the General Manager and Lab Director of the Microsoft AI For Good Research Lab, where he leads a team of data scientists and researchers specializing in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and statistical modeling across Microsoft's AI For Good initiatives, including AI For Earth, AI For Humanitarian Action, AI For Accessibility, and AI For Health. He pioneered Microsoft's research efforts on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), with findings published in top peer-reviewed journals such as Pediatrics and featured in major media outlets including The New York Times, CNN, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and over 100 news organizations worldwide. Juan joined Microsoft in 2009, contributing to the Microsoft Experimentation Platform (EXP) by designing and executing randomized control experiments, and later led a data mining and machine learning team within Bing at scale. He serves as editor of the Microsoft Journal of Applied Research (MSJAR) and plays a key role in defining the data science discipline at Microsoft. Prior to Microsoft, he co-founded and served as CTO of Alerts.com, and spent six years at the InterAmerican Development Bank in Washington, D.C., applying data science to poverty reduction and inequality programs across Latin America and the Caribbean. Juan holds two computer science degrees from the Catholic University of Uruguay and a graduate degree in Data Mining and Machine Learning from Johns Hopkins University. A sought-after international speaker, he has presented at Strata, IEEE, Berkeley, Cornell, and TEDx, as well as at conferences across Canada, Switzerland, Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Uruguay.