How one data scientist is pioneering techniques to detect security threats
Data science is an increasingly popular field of study that’s relevant to every industry. When Maria Puertas Calvo was a student, she never imagined that one day she would pioneer data science techniques to detect security threats. She started her Microsoft career on the Safety Platform team, developing algorithms to identify Microsoft accounts that send spam emails. She then worked on machine learning to detect account compromise in real-time for Microsoft accounts.
Maria now leads the data science team for security in the identity division, working on several problems: protecting users from account compromise, protecting our own infrastructure from fraud and abuse, and making sure that spammers and bots don’t create accounts that will harm people or other organizations. Her work has been so critical that her team is doubling in size, expanding from Redmond to Dublin and Atlanta.
In honor of Women’s History Month, Alex Simons, Corporate Vice President of Identity Program Management, sat down with Maria to learn more about her groundbreaking work and inspiring story. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Alex: Maria, how did you get into engineering?
Maria: I am originally from Madrid, Spain. I was always interested in math and science. Since I was little, I was always the straight-A student—really in love with numbers. When I started studying physics in high school, I knew that I wanted to have a career in science, doing something innovative.
In Spain, you don’t really leave for college. You go to class during the day, and then you go back to your parents’ home at night. A really good university was only 10 minutes away from my house. It wasn’t really engineering-focused, but it did have one technical school that offered electrical engineering and computer science.
Alex: What prompted you to make the transition from pure electrical engineering into something more forensics-focused and then eventually data science-focused?
Maria: It was all pretty accidental, not something I had planned. I did really well in college—I was first in my class. And I finished in 2010, in the middle of the Great Recession, which hit the Spanish labor market horribly. At that time, the unemployment rate was 25 percent. The lucky ones, like people in engineering, were getting job offers. But when you’re in technology, the only options in Spain are to work for a consulting company or to do support or sales. There weren’t any entry-level jobs in research and development.
So, I started a master’s with a group doing research on biometrics. The master’s was also in computer science and very related to artificial intelligence and a lot of interconnected fields like multimedia signal processing, computer vision, and natural language processing. I did my thesis on statistics around forensic fingerprints, and the probability of a random match between a latent fingerprint found at a crime scene and a random person that could have been wrongly convicted of that crime.
Alex: So what is the likelihood of that happening?
Maria: It’s really, really low. But it’s not zero.
Alex: Okay, that’s totally fascinating! I recall that you actually did your graduate work here in the United States, right?
Maria: When I finished my master’s, I was dating my now-husband, who is American. And I did not want to finish the whole PhD. I wanted to go work in the industry because I had been a student for seven years already, plus the rest of my life before that. I also wanted to start a life, and not do long distance between Madrid and Washington, D.C. So, I took advantage of my scholarship to become a visiting researcher at the University of Maryland working on iris recognition biometrics. I ended up staying about nine months.
Alex: Oh, wow. My father actually got his PhD from the University of Maryland—I was born there. Small world! So then, tell us how you ended up at Microsoft.
Maria: I didn’t find academia very rewarding.
