Data Science Summit - why should you care?

The data science summit is a non-profit event is organized by Intel, Comcast, Pandora, Dato, Cloudera and O’Reilly Media. The Summit brings together researchers and data scientists from academia as well as industry to discuss state of the art data science, applied machine learning and predictive applications. The conference agenda has been co-created with Dr. Ben Lorica, Chief Scientist of O’Reilly Media who serves as the content manager of the O’Reilly Strata Conferences.

We are expecting 1000 data scientists to attend on Monday July 20 in SF, as this year we were able to group together an amazing group of data science leaders. We got speakers from four major data science domains:

• Infrastructure
• Data engineering
• Machine learning and predictive applications 
• Visualisation of big data

From the infrastructure viewpoint, Prof. Mike Franklin (UC Berkeley) is the Director of Berkeley AMPLab and a co-founder in DataBricks, the cloud service hosting Spark. Dr. Misha Bilenko is a senior researcher at Microsoft, working on Microsoft Azure ML, a machine learning cloud service. Ron Kasabian is VP Big Data at Intel who will cover Intel effort in the data science domain. Prof. Alex Smola is the creator of the Parameter Server which is an efficient distributed infrastructure for ML applications deployed in Google and other companies.

We call data engineering the data cleaning and transformation that needs to happen before we can apply the machine learning methods. Wes McKinney, is the creator of the popular pandas Python data science package, who recently sold his startup to Cloudera. Pandas has a lot of slicing and dicing operations which help with quick data science.  Prof. Jeff Heer (UW), is the creator of d3.js - the popular visualization software, and also a co-founder of Trifacta a data engineering startup. Trifacta allows you to visually specify complex data transformations that will be later executed on a cluster.  Dr. John Mount is the author of the popular book "Practical Data Science with R".

D3.js visualization software

 From the machine learning aspect, Prof. Carlos Guestrin (UW), is the founder and CEO of Dato, our popular big data analytics framework. Prof. Mike Jordan (Berkeley) Mike Jordan is famous for his work on neural networks, graphical models (specifically variational inference) and Bayesian non-parametric statistics. In recent years he's been working on statistical methods in Big Data. His recent Reddit AMA appearance (in which he bashed deep learning) generated a lot of chatter. Prof. Christopher Re (Stanford) has many applied works in this domain, one of the recent ones is DeepDive, a system which utilises domain specific knowledge and users feedback to improve modeling and predictions. Prof. Robert (Rob) Tibshirani (Stanford) is famous for his sparse L1 regression work (Lasso). Prof. Lisa Getoor (Univ. of Maryland) is the author of the popular book Introduction to Statistical Relational Learning.  Prof. Jure Leskovec (Stanford) is known for his social network research. Recently he sold his startup Kosei to Pinterest. 

In terms of predictive applications, Dr. Tao Ye is a senior scientist at Pandora Internet Radio working on their recommendation engine. Dr. Jan Neumann is manager of recommendations at Comcast. Joe Resinger is CTO and Co-founder of Premise Data, a mobile data collection platform. Dr. Soundar Srinivasan is a senior researcher at Bosch Research working on industrial sensor data.  

Large scale social network visualization by Uncharted

We also plan to give the stage to a few younger startups that are working on ground braking research. Dr. Leo Meyerovicz from Graphistry will discuss GPU aided visualisation for graphs that were too big to visualize before.
Rob Harper, Lead architect at Uncharted, will also discuss hierarchical graph visualisation. 

Dr. Kira Radinsky is the founder of SalesPredict, a sales lead ranking startup. A related and bigger company is C9 Inc, where Andy Twigg, chief technology officer will also give a talk about their data science. Prof. Eyal Amir (UIUC) will present ParkNav, a startup for helping finding parking. Alec Radford, head of research at indico.io, will present their cloud hosted deep learning company. Paul Dix, CEO of InfluxDB will present their time series database. 

There is still an opportunity to get involved! Send me a note if you like to speak or sponsors the event 

A special hotel discount is available for our guests.