Mahir Yavuz
Engineering and product leader. Teacher and advisor. Turning data into products since 1998.
Head of Engineering at AirOps. Before that, Mahir led engineering for Search, Recommendations and Ads at Etsy, co-founded Topos as its CTO, directed data science at R/GA and was a senior researcher at Ars Electronica Futurelab in Linz. His teams have taken on data problems for companies including Nike, SAP, Siemens, PwC, Google and Microsoft, and his work at Etsy has been featured in a Google Cloud customer story and on the Stack Overflow podcast.
He has taught since 2003, at schools including Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Pratt, the University of Art and Design Linz and Istanbul Bilgi University. At Columbia Engineering he lectures on Business Applications of LLMs and Product Management with AI. He has spoken at events such as TEDx Vienna, Microsoft Build, Google Cloud Next and the Fast Company Innovation Festival. More are listed under Talks and press.
He publishes a new data visualization every day at casualdata.com.
On view today
No. 012 · 12 Nov 2026
Ebru, sheet by sheet
A marbler’s tray seen from above: drop the colours, draw them back and forth, comb them, then lay a sheet of paper on the water and keep the sheet as a picture.
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Experiments
- No. 012Ebru, sheet by sheet
- No. 011A piano, tuned by ear
- No. 010The S&P 500, by weight
- No. 009The midterm tide
- No. 008Philosophy, mind to mind
- No. 007Iznik, plate by plate
- No. 006New York, interlocked
- No. 005The year in relief
- No. 004Istanbul, piece by piece
- No. 003Manhattan sundial
- No. 002Self-portrait in type
- No. 001Self-portrait in latent space