WHO WE ARE
We know how to use data and drive good decision making!
Yasamin Miller
MANAGING DIRECTOR
Miller has a M.Sc. (1985) in Statistics and a B.Sc. (1983) in Applied Statistics and Computer Science from McMaster University.
Our team is led by Yasamin, who is the founder and Director of Cornell University's Survey Research Institute (SRI) from 1996 to 2015. She is also a founding member and Past-President of the Association of Academic Survey Research Organizations. Before that she was at Stanford University where she designed systems to collect large-scale data and conducted data analysis using complex statistical modeling. This extensive practical experience in data collection and analysis has given her the foundation to work with clients to offer the best solutions to meet their goals. And just as importantly, YMG has a vast network of experts who offer a wide range of services at affordable prices.
She understands how to grow a business using data to drive good decision making as well as to answer important research questions.
Some Highlights of Accomplishments:
Sysco Foods, Inc. was privately held with revenues under $10B when Yasamin first took charge of designing and administering their annual customer and employee satisfaction surveys. After 10 years of delivering high quality survey results used to inform their business decisions, they are now publicly traded and rank 7th in the Fortune 500 companies.
Division of the Budget, Albany, NY used Yasamin’s expertise to conduct a monthly survey of 500 businesses in New York State from 2004 to 2015 to inform economic policy making for the state.
Weill Cornell Medical College, a two time recipient of the prestigious $50M NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award, worked with Yasamin to implement surveys to aid in a portion of their assessment/evaluation charge of the award.
OUR ADVISORY BOARD
Frankovic spent over three decades at CBS News working in collaboration with The New York Times. She retired as their Director of Surveys in 2009 and is an Election and Polling consultant for CBS News, YouGov, Harvard University, Open Society Foundations and other survey research organizations. She has served as President of both the World Association for Public Opinion and the American Association for Public Opinion Research, and has won many national awards for her work including the 2008 AAPOR Award for Exceptionally Distinguished Achievement, that association’s highest honor. She chaired the committees that wrote the 2014 ESOMAR/WAPOR guide to Opinion Polls and the WAPOR guide to Exit Polls and Election Forecasts. She currently sits on the ESOMAR Professional Standards Committee. She has a Ph.D. in political science. She taught at the University of Vermont, was a visiting professor at Cornell University, and Professional in Residence at the Annenberg School.
Kathleen Frankovic
Jeff Hancock
Hancock is a Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. He is an expert in social media and specializes in using computational linguistics and experiments to understand how the words we use can reveal psychological and social dynamics, such as deception and trust, emotional dynamics, intimacy and relationships, and social support. He is well-known for his research on how people use deception with technology, from sending texts and emails to detecting fake online reviews. His TED Talk on deception has been seen over 1 million times. He has over 80 journal articles and conference proceedings and has been supported by funding from the NSF and DOD. His work on lying and technology has been frequently featured in the popular press, including the New York Times, CNN, NPR, CBS and the BBC. He has a PhD in Psychology from Dalhousie University, Canada. He was a Professor of Information Science and Communication at Cornell prior to joining Stanford in 2015.
Lavista is currently the principal data scientist for Microsoft Data Science team (cDnA), where he works with a team of data scientists in areas including Machine Learning , Causal inference, and Statistical modeling searching for insights in petabytes of data. Juan joined Microsoft in 2009 to work for the Microsoft Experimentation Platform (EXP) where he designed and ran randomized control experiments across different Microsoft properties. In Microsoft, Juan also worked as part of the Bing Data Mining team. Before joining Microsoft, Juan was the CTO and co-founder of alerts.com. Juan has two computer science degrees from the Catholic University in Uruguay, and a graduate degree in Data Mining from Johns Hopkins University. He has been a speaker at many DataScience/Big Data conferences in many countries including the US, Canada, Argentina, Colombia and Uruguay, and he also was a TEDx Speaker in 2010 in Argentina.
Juan Miguel Lavista
What sets us apart from most conventional survey organizations is we have a dedicated panel of experts that cover a wide range of disciplines available to work with you to meet and exceed your expectations. Collectively, or POEs cover over x disciplines, with over many decades of experience – all available to help you.