E239 Erin Gustafson, Lead Data Scientist at Duolingo

Today's guest is Erin Gustafson, Lead Data Scientist at Duolingo in Pittsburgh, PA. Founded in 2011, Duolingo is the world’s most popular way to learn a language. Their mission is to develop the best education in the world and make it universally available. Today, Duolingo have become the most downloaded education app in the history of the App Store and in 2019, it became the top-grossing education app worldwide.

Learning a new language is hard, but Duolingo believes it can be fun. They use bite-sized lessons that feel like playing a game to keep our learners motivated. With over 500 million learners, they have unprecedented data insights on how people learn. Their teams of language learning scientists, machine learning engineers and AI experts use this data to constantly improve their effectiveness. Duolingo are building a future in which the highest-quality education is accessible to all.

In today's episode, Erin will discuss:

The role of Data Science in Duolingo’s language learning platform,

Interesting projects & her day-to-day role,

Top advice when transitioning from academia into industry,

How they are applying AI & Data to improve the user experience,

The future of EdTech and

Her top tips for landing that data science role