Don’t try to beat Benika Hall at fantasy sports — she’ll win every time.
While pursuing her master’s and doctorate in bioinformatics from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Hall began experimenting with big data for sports analytics, practicing programming and advanced statistics — laying the foundation for her future career as a senior data scientist at NVIDIA.
After developing and training AI models that helped predict player performance for multiple professional sports, she realized that her daily fantasy sports projections were figuratively and literally — money.
While still in school, she in 2017 cofounded ProLytics — a company that streamlined deep learning models to provide fantasy sports users with recommended roster selections to increase their chances of winning. The company grew to over 15 data scientists, designers, developers and interns over the course of a year. What initially started as a hobby became a tool for learning and success. When Hall transitioned to a full-time analytics role at a large national bank, she used the same models and concepts she honed at ProLytics, just on different data sets.
In 2020, Hall joined NVIDIA as a senior data scientist, where she combines her experience in financial services with her passion for AI and data science. As a kid, she loved taking apart and reassembling electronics to see how they worked and — as a longtime gamer — Hall had been following NVIDIA for decades. Drawn to solving challenging problems, she found NVIDIA to be the perfect fit.
In her role, Hall helps large financial services firms adopt NVIDIA technology and accelerate their generative AI journey.
Many banks use generative AI to boost productivity, develop customer-facing virtual assistants or detect fraudulent transactions. Hall listens to customers’ pain points and helps them determine how they can optimize their solutions using products including the NVIDIA NeMo platform for custom generative AI, RAPIDS data science libraries and NVIDIA Riva speech and translation AI.
“AI is used in financial services more than people realize,” said Hall. “I love being the voice of our customers and bridging the education gap. I’m passionate about educating people about AI and how they can apply new technologies in their roles.”
One of Hall’s proudest moments at NVIDIA was presenting her work on how graph neural networks (GNNs) are used in fraud detection with financial industry leaders at the NVIDIA GTC technology conference. GNNs can detect suspicious actions in accounts and transactions and aggregate the information to identify larger patterns.
Recently, Hall has focused on graph retrieval-augmented generation — or GraphRAG — for financial knowledge graphs, which helps provide comprehensive and contextually aware responses for generative AI applications. Hall and her colleagues’ published research helped NVIDIA teams improve their approach to GraphRAG and is now being integrated into the NVIDIA NeMo Retriever collection of AI microservices for information retrieval.
Hall’s team aims to divide their time supporting customers, the community and their own professional growth — and she credits her leaders with giving her opportunities to continuously grow and develop her skills.
“We have so many opportunities to learn and collaborate with the brightest minds in tech,” she said. “At NVIDIA, I’m a student and a professional at the same time.”
Mentoring the younger generation has been important to Hall since her days leading a startup. She often speaks to students interested in AI and machine learning, including at her undergraduate alma mater of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, which recently entered a collaboration with NVIDIA aimed at fostering economic growth, enhancing workforce capabilities, advancing research and promoting innovation through the use of AI.
“My role at NVIDIA gives me a voice — and the opportunity to show others that they can do it too,” she said. “We’re doing our life’s work and solving the world’s most challenging problems, and I want to look back at who I uplifted along the way.”
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