Dato 2015 - Data Science Summit & Dato Conference 2015

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 three major data science domains:
- Infrastructure
- Data engineering
- Machine learning and predictive applications
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".
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) 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 utilizes 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).
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 big data research at Comcast. Esteban Alvarez from VARANIDEA will share their work about health care analytics in Nigeria.
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 visualization for graphs that were too big to visualize before.
There is still an opportunity to get involved! Send a note to Danny Bickson (bickson at dato.com) if you like to speak at or sponsor the event.
Registration information and the latest lineup of speakers can be found at https://dato.com/events/conference15/.