SCIENCE/WORK

Dr. Yana Volkovich is a Principal Data Scientist Manager at Microsoft Advertising. 

Previously, she worked as the Director of Data Science at Xandr, where she led the Supply Side and Identity work streams. In this role, she supervised projects such as Auction Logic, Supply Path Optimization, Cross Device Graphs, Future Ad Id solutions, and Cookieless Optimization and Measurement. In 2022, Yana was recognized as one of the "20 Top Women in Media & Ad Tech to Look Out For" by AdExchanger and AdMonsters.

Earlier in her career, Yana was a Senior Scientist at Eurecat, one of the largest technology centers in Spain. In 2014, she was a visiting Marie Curie Research Fellow at Cornell Tech. She earned her PhD in Applied Probability from the University of Twente and her MSc in Computer Science, summa cum laude, from the Saint Petersburg State University. She graduated from the Saint Petersburg Lyceum 239, the top-ranked high school in Russia.

Yana's research interests include Graph theory, Machine/Deep Learning, Computational Social Science, and Heavy-tailed distributions. Dr. Volkovich has served as a senior/program committee member for several leading scientific conferences (KDD 2022, 2020-18, WWW 2021-18, RecSys 2020-18, ic2s2 2020-10, ICWSM 2016-12, AdKDD 2024-22, 2020-18, LocWeb 2021-15, WAW 2024, 2023, 2020-09, IEEE CryptoEx 2024, 2023) and as a reviewer for scientific journals in the fields of Probability, Computer Science, and Computational Social Science. 

Yana has authored 3 patents and more than 30 publications, which have received over 1500 citations on Google Scholar. She speaks 5 languages: Russian, English, Spanish, Dutch, and Catalan.

NEWS

• Excited to announce the inclusion of my drawing in Kentler International Drawing Space's juried group exhibition (June-July, 2025). 

• 💥 Check out my latest! A fiction story that playfully explores a surreal AI-driven future where synthetic data has drowned out reality, making truth indistinguishable from fiction. LOL, lightness of living (February, 2025).

• Fair demographic ratio pacing patent has been granted (August, 2024). 

• Probabilistic frequency capping patent has been published (September, 2023).

• Price Arbitrage for DeFi Derivatives (pdf) was published and presented at IEEE CryptoEx 2023 (March, 2023). The dataset can be found here. 

• Line item-based audience extension patent has been granted (August, 2022). 

• Check out On the topic of Topics blog post about deconstructing and analyzing the Topics API, a part of a series of browser APIs Google Sandbox. 

• I was selected among 20 Top Women in Media & Ad Tech to Look Out For by AdMonsters (June, 2022). 

• I am honored to be recognized by AdExchanger and AdMonsters as a Top Women in Media & Ad Tech 2022 Honoree in Data Demystifiers category. (May, 2022).

• Check out  Ad Tech DeFi blog post where I explore how a new Ad Tech ecosystem might look in the near future (operating in Web 3.0) and discuss a vision in which Ad Tech products become available on a decentralized public blockchain network.

MEDIA 

• 20 Top Women in Media & Ad Tech to Look Out For (AdMonsters, June 2022) 

• AdExchanger and AdMonsters Top Women in Media & Ad Tech 2022 Honoree in Data Demystifiers category. (May, 2022)

Medium @ Xandr Tech

On the topic of Topics 

Ad Tech DeFI 

Graph-based Identity Resolution at Scale​

ElasticNet4j: A Performant Elastic Net Logistic Regression Solver in Java

Lessons Learned from Building Scalable Machine Learning Pipelines

• Los Angeles Times, Being ‘Wikipedian’ trumps party affiliation, study finds, 2013

• Wired Magazine Blog, All in the City Family: the Network of Sister Cities, 2013

• European Journalism Observatory, Wikipedia, A Place for Political Dialogue,  2012 

• MIT Technology Review, The Worrying Consequences of the Wikipedia Gender Gap, 2012

• The Atlantic, The World’s Most Important People, According to Wikipedia, 2012