About Cristos
I was born in Los Angeles and raised in the San Fernando Valley, where I attended public schools. In 1987, I was fortunate to receive a fellowship to attend Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where I studied math and computer science.
After graduating from Cornell in 1991, I moved to the Bay Area to work at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). Soon after I met Elizabeth, the love of my life, and we have been together ever since.
I spent three years at Andersen, but I wanted more technical challenges, so I went to graduate school in math, first at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and then at UC Santa Barbara. I spent two years studying math in beautiful Santa Barbara and earned a Master’s degree before transferring to the Ph.D. program in mathematical logic at UC Berkeley.
During summers in graduate school I continued to work at technology companies in Silicon Valley, including Red Pepper Software, and then at Peoplesoft after Red Pepper was acquired. While I was studying math, my future wife Elizabeth was in law school earning her J.D.
By the fall of 1998, I was a graduate student at UC Berkeley and my wife Elizabeth was an attorney in San Francisco. It was clear to me that I would need at least four more years to complete my Ph.D., and if I were to remain in academia, I would need to move somewhere outside the Bay Area. So in 1999, I took a leave of absence from my Ph.D. program at Berkeley and I’ve been “on leave” ever since.
In May of 2000, we welcomed our first of four children. By 2005, we had four children under five years old, and we were living in Burlingame.
Since leaving graduate school, I have worked at startup companies and large companies, including Impresse, DemandTec, Amazon, Google, and YouTube. My expertise has been in the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning to industrial problems. Over the past few years, I have been particularly interested in ethical considerations concerning machine learning and AI, especially fairness and accountability.