Michael A. X. Izatt is chief data scientist in the Insight & Analytics Group at Hitachi Consulting. Trained as a theoretical chemical physicist at MIT and Chicago, Max began his career with Bell Laboratories and Sandia National Laboratories in the Laser Projects Division of the Pulsed Power Research Group, where he worked on laser-initiated channel-ionization for space-based directed-energy delivery systems. In the private sector, Max pivoted to fixed-income algorithmic trading at Salomon Brothers, where he was lead quantitative programmer in the Tokyo financial group. He founded CentraLytics Corporation, a Microsoft Independent Software Vendor (ISV) at the ChicagoMercantile Exchange in 2002, which developed distributed-computing and collaboration pricing engines that coupled the desktop with the Microsoft enterprise business-intelligence stack for near-real-time high-frequency trading applications. CentraLytics’ intellectual property was successfully acquired within the Microsoft footprint in 2014. At Hitachi, Max works on Riemannian-motivated stochastic processes with thermodynamic applications in spin-glass and near-spin-glass convex systems, such as neural networks with applications in artificial intelligence applied to industrial process optimization.