Media & Entertainment

Twitter Loses Its Chief Scientist, Summize Co-Founder Abdur Chowdhury

Comment

The turnover continues at Twitter. Following the exit of Biz Stone, the firing of four key product guys, and the departure of a number of early Twitter employees, we’ve learned that another big name has left the company: Chief Scientist Abdur Chowdhury.

Chowdhury actually confirmed his exit yesterday on Twitter, but everyone seemed to miss it (hopefully because everyone was watching Disrupt). He came over to the service with the Summize acquisition in 2008. He was a co-founder of that search engine alongside Greg Pass, who left his CTO position at Twitter in May. We’re told that all of the original Summize team is now gone from Twitter. (Update: Looks like Eric Jensen and Matt Sanford are leaving today.)

As Chief Scientist, Chowdhury led a number of important data projects at Twitter over the years. He was key in implementing Twitter Search, Recommendations, and Trends. Twitter declined to comment on Chowdhury’s departure.

Chowdhury is also a co-founder of the Alta Vista School in San Francisco and at one point was the chief architect of search at AOL.

While Chowdhury’s departure is a big one, there’s quite a bit of talk out there of even bigger ones. This is all likely related to Twitter’s latest massive round of funding. We’re looking into it. Stay tuned.

Update: As hinted, Fred Wilson and Bijan Sabet are leaving Twitter’s board.

[image: @sacca]

More TechCrunch

Poshmark, the social commerce site that lets people buy and sell new and used items to each other, launched a paid marketing tool on Thursday, giving sellers the ability to…

Poshmark’s ‘Promoted Closet’ tool lets sellers boost all their listings at once

More money for the generative AI boom: Y Combinator-backed developer infrastructure startup Recall.ai announced Thursday it’s raised a $10 million Series A funding round, bringing its total raised to over $12M.…

YC-backed Recall.ai gets $10M Series A to help companies use virtual meeting data

Engineers Adam Keating and Jeremy Andrews were tired of using spreadsheets and screenshots to collab with teammates — so they launched a startup, Colab, to build a better way. The…

Colab’s collaborative tools for engineers line up $21M in new funding

Reddit announced on Wednesday that it is reintroducing its awards system after shutting down the program last year. The company said that most of the mechanisms related to awards will…

Reddit reintroduces its awards system

Sigma Computing, a startup building a range of data analytics and business intelligence tools, has raised $200 million in a fresh VC round.

Sigma is building a suite of collaborative data analytics tools

European Union enforcers of the bloc’s online governance regime, the Digital Services Act (DSA), said Thursday they’re closely monitoring disinformation campaigns on the Elon Musk-owned social network X (formerly Twitter)…

EU ‘closely’ monitoring X in wake of Fico shooting as DSA disinfo probe rumbles on

Wind is the largest source of renewable energy in the U.S., according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, but wind farms come with an environmental cost as wind turbines can…

Spoor uses AI to save birds from wind turbines

The key to taking on legacy players in the financial technology industry may be to go where they have not gone before. That’s what Chicago-based Aeropay is doing. The provider…

Cannabis and gaming payments startup Aeropay is now offering an alternative to Mastercard and Visa

Facebook and Instagram are under formal investigation in the European Union over child protection concerns, the Commission announced Thursday. The proceedings follow a raft of requests for information to parent…

EU opens child safety probes of Facebook and Instagram, citing addictive design concerns

Bedrock Materials is developing a new type of sodium-ion battery, which promises to be dramatically cheaper than lithium-ion.

Forget EVs: Why Bedrock Materials is targeting gas-powered cars for its first sodium-ion batteries

Private equity giant Thoma Bravo has announced that its security information and event management (SIEM) company LogRhythm will be merging with Exabeam, a rival cybersecurity company backed by the likes…

Thoma Bravo’s LogRhythm merges with Exabeam in more cybersecurity consolidation

Consumer protection groups around the European Union have filed coordinated complaints against Temu, accusing the Chinese-owned ultra low-cost e-commerce platform of a raft of breaches related to the bloc’s Digital…

Temu accused of breaching EU’s DSA in bundle of consumer complaints

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

Google I/O 2024: Here’s everything Google just announced

The AI industry moves faster than the rest of the technology sector, which means it outpaces the federal government by several orders of magnitude.

Senate study proposes ‘at least’ $32B yearly for AI programs

The FBI along with a coalition of international law enforcement agencies seized the notorious cybercrime forum BreachForums on Wednesday.  For years, BreachForums has been a popular English-language forum for hackers…

FBI seizes hacking forum BreachForums — again

The announcement signifies a significant shake-up in the streaming giant’s advertising approach.

Netflix to take on Google and Amazon by building its own ad server

It’s tough to say that a $100 billion business finds itself at a critical juncture, but that’s the case with Amazon Web Services, the cloud arm of Amazon, and the…

Matt Garman taking over as CEO with AWS at crossroads

Back in February, Google paused its AI-powered chatbot Gemini’s ability to generate images of people after users complained of historical inaccuracies. Told to depict “a Roman legion,” for example, Gemini would show…

Google still hasn’t fixed Gemini’s biased image generator

A feature Google demoed at its I/O confab yesterday, using its generative AI technology to scan voice calls in real time for conversational patterns associated with financial scams, has sent…

Google’s call-scanning AI could dial up censorship by default, privacy experts warn

Google’s going all in on AI — and it wants you to know it. During the company’s keynote at its I/O developer conference on Tuesday, Google mentioned “AI” more than…

The top AI announcements from Google I/O

Uber is taking a shuttle product it developed for commuters in India and Egypt and converting it for an American audience. The ride-hail and delivery giant announced Wednesday at its…

Uber has a new way to solve the concert traffic problem

Google is preparing to launch a new system to help address the problem of malware on Android. Its new live threat detection service leverages Google Play Protect’s on-device AI to…

Google takes aim at Android malware with an AI-powered live threat detection service

Users will be able to access the AR content by first searching for a location in Google Maps.

Google Maps is getting geospatial AR content later this year

The heat pump startup unveiled its first products and revealed details about performance, pricing and availability.

Quilt heat pump sports sleek design from veterans of Apple, Tesla and Nest

The space is available from the launcher and can be locked as a second layer of authentication.

Google’s new Private Space feature is like Incognito Mode for Android

Gemini, the company’s family of generative AI models, will enhance the smart TV operating system so it can generate descriptions for movies and TV shows.

Google TV to launch AI-generated movie descriptions

When triggered, the AI-powered feature will automatically lock the device down.

Android’s new Theft Detection Lock helps deter smartphone snatch and grabs

The company said it is increasing the on-device capability of its Google Play Protect system to detect fraudulent apps trying to breach sensitive permissions.

Google adds live threat detection and screen-sharing protection to Android

This latest release, one of many announcements from the Google I/O 2024 developer conference, focuses on improved battery life and other performance improvements, like more efficient workout tracking.

Wear OS 5 hits developer preview, offering better battery life

For years, Sammy Faycurry has been hearing from his registered dietitian (RD) mom and sister about how poorly many Americans eat and their struggles with delivering nutritional counseling. Although nearly…

Dietitian startup Fay has been booming from Ozempic patients and emerges from stealth with $25M from General Catalyst, Forerunner