Why Work For Stratify?

Name: Joy Thomas
Title: Chief Scientist Office: Mountain View, CA
Education: B.Tech (IIT Madras), M.S. (Electrical Engineering), Ph.D. (Electrical Engineering, Stanford University)

What was your background before you came to Stratify?

After working for more than 9 years at IBM Research Labs, I joined Stratify (then PurpleYogi) when it started.

Why did you decide to come to Stratify?

I was always fascinated by information theory and statistics and applying those concepts to solve the problem of finding information, but I wanted to develop those theories into products that people could actually use to solve large problems in the real world. I joined Stratify to do just that. While my previous job at IBM Research Labs allowed me to explore many interesting areas, it took many years for the original idea to get translated into a product.

What cool projects have you worked on at Stratify?

Most of the projects involved using advances in machine learning to allow people to find information more easily. Our initial application was for the web, which grew into enterprise data, and evolved to organizing information for electronic discovery. I’m actively involved in developing technology to classify documents based on multiple classifiers, automatically building a conceptual organization and refining it with new documents and allowing a user to take a large corpus of documents and quickly see the main themes. One of the coolest applications that I’ve worked on is Stratify Visual Analytics which analyzes email traffic flow within an enterprise and displays it visually to the user in an intuitive, easy-to-interpret format.

What are your goals at Stratify – what are you working to achieve?

My passion at Stratify is to create the very best tools to make unstructured information useful and actionable. As the volumes of data increase, the challenge of separating the useful information from the chaff gets harder and harder. We have only just scratched the surface in terms of applying algorithms from statistics and information theory to process the data to make it more useful.

What do you like about working at Stratify?

I interact with a bunch of really smart, highly motivated and friendly people – I couldn’t ask for more! We don’t stress on formal meetings, in fact some of the most advanced product features have developed from interesting ideas exchanged at hallway conversations. I feel a great sense of camaraderie from building the technology, product and company from scratch with such incredible people and so it’s not surprising we as a company have a strong sense of loyalty and pride in our accomplishments, and confidence in tackling new challenges moving forward.