Team

Albert Azout

Chief Executive Officer

Albert is a Co-Founder of NYC-based StyleCaster, the fastest growing women's lifestyle platform on the web. He is also a co-founder of Sub Rosa, a top digital advertising firm in New York City. Prior to Sociocast, Albert worked at Lehman Brothers where he built his quantitative and engineering background. He graduated from Babson College with a B.A. in Business Administration and serves on the advisory board of various start-ups including Last Pictures, Qwiki, Contender.com, and CassaDecor.

Giri Iyengar

Chief Technology Officer

Giri was formerly the CTO of Signal Patterns, a startup that develops next-generation iPhone and social media applications focused on aggregating consumer behavior. Previously, he was a Computer Scientist at IBM TJ Watson Research Center where he worked on Medical Imaging and Multimedia Mining. Giri did his doctoral work at the MIT Media Laboratory and holds a B.E in Electrical Engineering from IIT Mumbai.

Scott Hoffman

Chief Operating Officer

Scott was formerly the Co-Founder of Lotame, a leading ad network and data management platform in NYC. He was recently VP of Enterprise Solutions at [x+1], Director of National Account Development at Yahoo, and is on the Advisory Board of Bit.ly. Scott graduated from Syracuse University.

Suren Hiraman

VP of Technology

Before joining Sociocast, Suren served as Vice President of Technology at Proclivity Systems, a tech company focused on behavioral data mining, a Principal and Practice Manager at SunGard Consulting Services, and the Managing Principal of Global Integration Services for the Northeast U.S. Region at Salesforce.com. Suren holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from MIT.

Gna Phetsarath

Senior Hadoop Wrangler

Mr. Phetsarath is a senior technologist with over 20 years experience and a strong focus on high frequency multi-asset trading platforms and high performance computing systems. With a background in financial services technology consulting, he has worked for SunGard Consulting Services, Finetix LLC, Fort Point Partners LLC, and American Management Systems. His clients included most major banks in the New York area. Mr. Phetsarath graduated from the University of Virginia with a BS in Computer Science, and a dual minors in Environmental Engineering and MIS.

Alex Bernstein

Business Development

Alex claims to be one of the first members of his MBA graduation class to end up on a Management page. His career started at the Edgemont High School where he was a three-time NY State football champion. He then majored in finance at the University of Wisconsin's Grainger School of Business, which prepared him for his ensuing analyst role at Merrill Lynch. In 2009, Alex left Wall Street and enrolled in the full-time MBA program at NYU Stern Business School, where he specialized in Strategy and Finance. This experience led him to Beijing, China where he worked at Groupon prior to joining the Sociocast Team.

Deniz Sarioz

Data Scientist

Deniz is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the CUNY Graduate Center and recently defended his dissertation supervised by Janos Pach. His research interests span graph theory, computational geometry, approximation algorithms, network science, image processing and natural language processing. He has taught undergraduate courses at Brooklyn College and Hunter College since 2006. He holds a B.A. in Mathematics from Middlebury College and a B.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University.

Steve Morin

VP Product

Prior to Sociocast Steve worked at AT&T Interactive as Director of Engineering for Advanced Advertising Solutions. He is a founding member and was one of the leading Architects in creating Permuto. He spent many years developing and transforming Yahoo!'s Mobile Search Marketing Platform. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts and a M.S. in Computer Science with a concentration in information Assurance from Stony Brook University. He continues to sit on the advisory board of various start-ups including GainFitness and a Stealth Ad Startup.

Fizzy Ardalan

Corporate Communications

Fizzy Ardalan graduated from NYU in 2007 with a B.A in Philosophy. He has spent the last couple of years living and working in India for an NGO called Seva Mandir. He has written two books that are in the process of being published. He has recently joined Sociocast doing Corporate Communications and Social Media.