Karl Ni

Part-Time Lecturer

  • PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, San Diego 
  • BS in Electrical and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley 

Karl Ni is a lecturer in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, based in Silicon Valley. He is also the head of recommendations infrastructure and senior manager at Etsy.

Ni has always taken an interest in being an educator, and Khoury College’s reputation for inclusion and experiential learning aligns with his core values. Now teaching “Data Mining,” Ni finds it rewarding to facilitate promising, high-potential career paths for graduate students.

In industry, Ni has found that mining data at scale is foundational to informing business decisions, mitigating risk, identifying areas for improvement, and providing value to customers. With the advancement of modern computational processing, this data-based pattern analysis has become essential for businesses seeking to solve real-time, real-world problems.

Now at Etsy, Ni manages machine learning practitioners and infrastructure teams that build recommendations for cross-functional partners in e-commerce. He leverages large-scale analytics, recommendation sciences, multi-modal processing, and machine learning to connect buyers to over 150 million seller listings on Etsy’s mobile and desktop surfaces. Ni has also held leadership and research positions at Google, In-Q-Tel, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.