Pooyan Balouchian

Pooyan Balouchian is Vice President of Data Science for EBG, leading the effort to utilize big data by leveraging AI to extract hidden patterns that help make strategic decisions by other business units. His primary responsibilities include identifying relevant data sources, collecting structured and unstructured data, sourcing missing data by means of techniques such as data augmentation, organizing data into usable formats, building predictive models and machine learning algorithms, and enhancing EBG’s data collection process.

Prior to joining EBG in 2019, Pooyan was involved in architecting software solutions for well-known OTAs and channel managers, such as BookIt.com and EZYield (TravelClick). He helped build BookIt.com’s Rate Engine, and later architected a system called BEC (BookIt Extreme Cache) to boost the performance of their Rate Engine by a large margin. Pooyan also spent two years as a Systems Engineer on the NASA Gold Mission, building the data pipeline, capturing data from geostationary orbit above the Western Hemisphere, and further processing the data fed into different science projects led by NASA.

Pooyan spent six years on his Ph.D. at the University of Central Florida’s Computational Imaging Lab, focusing on human brain emulation by leveraging AI and Machine Learning techniques. His efforts led to numerous academic publications in international conference proceedings, eventually graduating in 2020 with his dissertation titled “Learning Context-sensitive Human Emotions in Categorical and Dimensional Domains.” He received a bachelor’s degree in Information Technology and a master’s degree in Computer Engineering from Eastern Mediterranean University.