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  • Visa Research

    Visa Research conducts applied research on the most challenging problems in the payment industry and provides technical thought leadership to guide the company's future.

Technology has moved beyond its traditional enabling role to become the major driver in the transformation of commerce. Companies that are able to accelerate innovation based on sound understanding and novel application of new and disruptive technologies will be at a distinct advantage and at the forefront of this transformation.

Visa has developed and is employing a comprehensive strategy to ensure and extend its commerce technology leadership position. This strategy in action includes the formation of Visa Research, aimed at complementing an already substantial investment in technology development with a focus on the scientific foundations of existing, emerging, and future commerce related technologies across broad time horizons. With the establishment of a formal research organization and the associated long-term commitment to technology research, Visa joins the ranks of a small number of industry leaders with both the insight and ability to substantially influence and systemically impact the future.

Visa Research News

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A paper authored by Visa Research scientist Rohit Sinha (together with UC Berkeley and MIT collaborators) has won Best Paper Award at the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), the flagship security conference of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The paper, titled "A Formal Foundation for Secure Remote Execution of Enclaves," formalizes hardware-based secure remote execution in a unified way for the first time and provides an accompanying software-verification methodology. This allows for provably establishing the integrity and confidentiality of software running on platforms such as Intel SGX, AMD SME, and MIT Sanctum, in turn bootstrapping trust and privacy in cloud environments.

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Hao Yang, VP of Data Analytics Research

Hao Yang, VP of Data Analytics Research

Dr. Hao Yang joined Visa Research as VP of Data Analytics Research in September 2015, where he is leading a team for advanced machine learning research to tackle challenging problems in the payment industry and develop the world's best commerce intelligence engine. Prior to joining Visa, Hao was a Software Engineer at Google Research, responsible for the research and development of a diverse set of machine learning technologies including social recommendation, knowledge discovery and semantic query understanding. Before Google, Hao was a Principal Researcher at Nokia Research Center, where he led a team of research scientists and engineers to drive innovations in data mining, machine learning, and real-time data processing and develop intelligent mobile services for various Nokia products. Hao also worked as a Research Staff Member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, focusing on distributed system technologies including stream processing, messaging and publish/subscribe systems.

Data Analytics

Visa's unique position as the world's largest payment network enables us to serve billions of consumers and tens of millions of merchants around the world on a daily basis. Our mission at the Data Analytics team is to unlock the hidden value in these massive high-quality financial data, and develop the world's best commerce intelligence engine to drive innovations in the payment industry and beyond. We conduct applied research in machine learning and related fields to deliver unique insights and capabilities to our partners and clients and help them grow their business. Our research areas include deep learning applications in financial data, supervised and unsupervised representation learning, predictive modeling for fraud and risk management, consumer behavior modeling, recommendation systems, scalable machine learning systems, privacy preserving data analytics, and related fields. 

Research projects

  • Deep Learning for Commerce – develop predictive models that are essential to all parties in the payment and commerce ecosystem using advanced deep learning technologies over the financial data warehouse at Visa.
  • Scalable Machine Learning System – experiment with new generations of distributed systems for machine learning applications to meet the challenge of ever increasing scale and complexity in the data processing pipeline.
  • Security Analytics – enable proactive defense in our critical network and system infrastructure through continuous monitoring and real-time anomaly detection using machine learning technologies. 

Security

Today's electronic payment ecosystems are possible because of a host of security technologies and capabilities that were developed over a very long and rich history of security research. Extending and enabling new ecosystems, to spur economic growth and improve the quality of life for everyone will require further advances in a number of key areas. We conduct fundamental and applied research in a number of security areas that are critical to Visa, our partners, and the world, including: mobile and distributed systems/cloud computing security, communication protocols and network security, cryptography and cryptanalysis, secure payment technologies, data and application security, malware and program analysis, user and data privacy, assurance and formal methods, security incident and event data analytics, and related fields. 

Research projects

  • Advances in Cryptography – aims to build on Visa’s extensive data protection capabilities to achieve policy-enforced full lifecycle cryptographic protection for data in transit, at rest, and during computation, for all computing environments and scenarios Visa employs.
  • Distributed and Endpoint Systems Security – enable end-to-end secure computation, data and workload management across the distributed enterprise, between ecosystem partners, and to/from the sea of endpoints and devices
  • Secure Data Acquisition and Analysis – balance advancements in cryptography and secure systems for strongest and most efficient context appropriate data acquisition, classification, protection and analysis across the computing spectrum. 

Future of Commerce

Our Future of Commerce team is currently focused on understanding the fundamentals of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. We explore ways to advance the science of blockchain technology and enable the discovery of real-world payment use cases. We collaborate with top universities and the world’s leading blockchain researchers to develop technologies that promise to transform the financial industry in the decade ahead. 

Shashank Agrawal, Visa Research team

Shashank Agrawal

Researcher
Security

Focus areas: Cryptography, Privacy and Distributed Computing

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Yilei Chen, Research Scientist.

Yilei Chen

Research Scientist
Security

Focus areas: Cryptography, Cryptoanalysis

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Robert Christensen, Visa Research team

Robert Christensen

Sr. Research Engineer
Data Analytics

Focus areas: Interactive Data Analysis, Deep Learning and Database Systems

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Mihai Christodorescu, Visa Research team

Mihai Christodorescu

Principal Researcher
Security

Focus areas: Software Security, Program Analysis and Systems Security 

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Mahashweta Das, Visa Research team

Mahashweta Das

Sr. Researcher
Data Analytics

Focus areas: Data Mining, Machine Learning and Databases

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Dean Galland, Visa Research team

Dean Galland

Head of Visa Research Operations
Research Operations

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Mina Ghashami

Mina Ghashami

Researcher
Data Analytics

Focus areas: Data mining, Scalable Machine learning, Streaming and Online Algorithms

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Hossein Hamooni, Visa Research team

Hossein Hamooni

Research Scientist
Data Analytics

Focus areas: Big Data, Distributed Knowledge Discovery and Machine Learning 

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Maryam Moosaei, Visa Research team

Maryam Moosaei

Research Scientist
Data Analytics

Focus areas: Deep Learning and Computer Vision

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Pratyay Mukherjee, Visa Research team

Pratyay Mukherjee

Researcher
Security

Focus areas: Cryptography, Security and Theory of Computation

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Peter Rindal, Research Scientist.

Peter Rindal

Research Scientist
Security

Focus areas: Cryptography, Privacy Enhancing Technologies, Distributed Computing

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photo of Malileh Shirvanian

Maliheh Shirvanian

System Security

Focus areas: Authentication, System Security, User-Centered Security

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Rohit Sinha, Visa Research team

Rohit Sinha

Researcher
Security

Focus areas: Secure Distributed Systems, Trusted Computing and Hardware-based Security and Programming Languages and Formal Verification

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Ke Wang, Visa Research Scientist

Ke Wang

Research Scientist
System Security

Focus areas: Program Analysis, Software Engineering, Deep Learning

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liang wang

Liang Wang

Principal Researcher
Data Analytics

Focus areas: Data Mining, Machine Learning, Fraud Analytics

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yanhong wu

Yanhong Wu

Research Scientist
Data Analytics

Focus areas: Visual Analytics, Graph Mining, Deep Learning

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Hao Yang, Visa Research team

Hao Yang

VP of Data Analytics
Data Analytics

Focus areas: Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Distributed Systems

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Michael Yeh, Visa Research Scientist

Michael Yeh

Research Scientist
Data Analytics

Focus areas: Data Mining, Machine Learning, Time Series Analysis

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Mahdi Zamani, Visa Research team

Mahdi Zamani

Researcher
Security

Focus areas: Security and Privacy, Distributed Algorithms and Applied Cryptography

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Yan Zheng, Visa Research team

Yan Zheng

Research Scientist
Data Analytics

Focus areas: Data Analytics, Machine Learning and Deep Learning

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Wei Zhang, Visa Research team

Wei Zhang

Principal Researcher
Data Analytics

Focus areas: Big Data Analytics, Machine Learning and Speech Technologies

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Our interns

For your internship, Visa Research will pair you with one or more of our full-time researchers. These mentors will help you pursue research on exciting, cutting-edge topics to advance the state of the art. As many of our interns do, you will publish your work at top conferences and obtain valuable patents. You will get continuous feedback and guidance throughout the internship, and get to present your research results to the whole team at the end of your internship.

Visa Research Intern Program

University building.

17

Universities

Group of three interns.

28

Interns

Lightbulb.

13

Patents filed

Article being written with a pencil.

17

Papers published or in submission to top conferences

Man and woman sitting at table

Working at Visa

Imagine working for one of the pioneers in the payment technology space. The kind of company that's been setting the bar for the way people pay and get paid for more than 50 years, and continues to innovate on a global scale. Now imagine that company is less than 10,000 employees worldwide, small enough that you'll actually have an impact and do some amazing things. Sounds pretty awesome. Well, that company exists and it's Visa.

Yep, Visa.

Imagine, in a single day, the diversity of transactions that Visa manages – from gaming enthusiasts who buy virtual goods to advance a level, to a small business merchant launching their first ecommerce business to a large consumer brand hitting their largest single-day sale. Now multiply transactions and interactions like that by millions on a global scale – that's Visa. It is a multi-billion dollar market that has experienced year over year growth! 

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Culture

Visa Research is a research community of scientists and engineers comprised of the most inspired and innovative thinkers and doers from across the country and around the world. We engage in fundamental and applied research, and inquisitive discussion of ideas and issues that both shape and challenge the global payments ecosystem. We foster and value a collaborative environment of inclusion that encourages dramatic results not possible when research is conducted in a vacuum.

We seek and cultivate explorers who are motivated to push the boundaries of technology beyond the conventional; to contribute to the broader innovation-driven environment at Visa, and realize the discoveries that will enable Visa, its clients and partners to solve business challenges and drive growth in digital commerce. 

Visa Research jobs

Visa Research jobs: job title in column 1, job category in column 2, job type in column 3, location in column 4, and Date in column 5

Job Title

Job Category

Type

Location

Date

Product Development and Management

Full-time

Palo Alto, CA, U.S.

09/27/2018

Product Development and Management

Full-time

Palo Alto, CA, U.S.

09/27/2018

Research and Development

Full-time

Palo Alto, CA, U.S.

09/27/2018

Technology and Operations

Full-time

Palo Alto, CA, U.S.

09/27/2018

Product Development and Management

Full-time

Palo Alto, CA, U.S.

09/27/2018

Research and Development

Full-time

Palo Alto, CA, U.S.

09/12/2018

Research and Development

Full-time

Palo Alto, CA, U.S.

09/12/2018
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Visa Research sponsored events

Real World Crypto logo

Real World Crypto Symposium

Visa Research joins other sponsors at the Real World Crypto 2018 conference, which brings together cryptography researchers, students and developers.

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ACM CCS logo

ACM CCS 2017

ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security brings together information security researchers, practitioners, developers, and users to explore and discuss cutting-edge ideas in the industry. 

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