Who will speak at Data Day Texas + AI
We continue to announce speakers for the 2024 edition of Data Day Texas. Follow us on Linkedin for the latest news - and book a discount room at the conference hotel - while there are still a few left.
Opening Keynote
Sol Rashidi (NYC)
With eight patents issued and receiving awards that include “Top 10 Women in Data & Applied AI”, “50 Most Powerful Women in Tech”, “Global 100 Data Power List”, “Top 20 CDOs”, Top 100 Innovators in Data & Analytics” and “Forbes AI Maverick of the 21st Century”, Sol Rashidi (Linkedin) is an energetic business leader and a goal-oriented technologist, skilled at coupling her technical acumen with story-telling abilities to articulate business value with early-stage startups and enterprises who are leaning into data, AI, and technology as a competitive advantage, while wanting to preserve the legacy in which they were founded upon.
Sol was the former CDAO for Merck, EVP & CDO for Sony Music, CDO for Royal Caribbean, AI, Data & Analytics Partner at E&Y, Chief Information & Digital Officer for Soli, and a key player in launching IBM's Gen-1 “Watson", pioneering IBM’s early advances in Enterprise Information Management.
MLOps Keynote
Mikiko Bazeley (San Francisco) @BazeleyMikiko
Mikiko Bazeley (Linkedin / YouTube / Substack / GitHub) is currently Head of AI Developer Relations at Labelbox. Most recently, she was Head of MLOps at Featureform. Mikiko has worked as an engineer, data scientist, and data analyst for companies like Mailchimp (Intuit), Teladoc, Sunrun, Autodesk as well as a handful of early stage startups. Mikiko leverages her knowledge and experiences as a practitioner, mentor, and strategist to contribute MLOps & production ML content through LinkedIn, Youtube, & Substack, as well as partnering with companies in the ML ecosystem like Nvidia. Her main goals are to help: data scientists deploy better models faster; ML platform engineers develop robust & scalable ML systems & stacks without breaking the bank; & bring the delight back into building ML products.
Mikiko will be presenting the MLOps Keynote:
MLOps: Where do we go from here?
#mlops #dataengineering
Jess Haberman (Boston) @JessHaberman
Jess Haberman is Director of Learning Solutions at Anaconda, where she leads content strategy, educational outreach, and developer relations. Previously, Jess was an acquisitions editor at O’Reilly Media, collaborating with tech industry leaders to develop instructional books and online content in data science and data engineering. She has presented at and facilitated technology conferences (O’Reilly’s Strata and Data Superstreams, PyCon US, Scale by the Bay, DataCon LA), webinars, live training courses, podcasts, publishing seminars, and writing retreats. Jess earned her BA in English Literature from Denison University and spent 14 years in nonfiction book publishing.
Jess will be presenting the following session:
Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Technical Book
#career
Closing Town Hall
Joe Reis (Salt Lake city)
Joe Reis (Linkedin), Co-Founder and CEO of Ternary Data, is a “recovering data scientist,” and a business-minded data nerd who’s worked in the data industry for 20 years. His responsibilities have ranged from statistical modeling, forecasting, machine learning, data engineering, data architecture, and everything else in between. Joe is co-host of the popular Monday Morning Data Chat (Spotify / Apple) as well as the newly launched Joe Reis Show (Apple / Spotify). Joe is also co-author of the bestselling O'Reilly book: Fundamentals of Data Engineering. Joe also teaches at the University of Utah as well as runs several meetups, including The Utah Data Engineering Meetup and SLC Python. When he’s not busy running a company, teaching, or creating content, Joe often finds himself DJing/making music, rock climbing, or trail running in the mountains around Salt Lake City, Utah.
#oreilly-showcase
Amy Hodler (Kettle Falls, Washington) @amyhodler
Amy Hodler is an evangelist for graph analytics, network science, and responsible AI. Amy has decades of experience in emerging tech at companies such as Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard (HP), Hitachi IoT, Neo4j, Cray, and Relational AI. Amy has a love for science history and a fascination for complexity studies. Amy is the co-author of the O'Reilly book: Graph Algorithms, as well as co-author of an upcoming volume on the history of graph analytics.
Amy will be presenting the following session:
Patterns of Power: Uncovering control points to influence outcomes
Amy will also be co-leading the following 90 minute hands-on workshop:
Causality: The Next Frontier of GenAI Explainability
#oreilly-showcase #genai #graphday
Machine Learning Keynote
Susan Shu Chang (Toronto) @susan_shuc
Susan Shu Chang (Linkedin) is currently Principal Data Scientist at Elastic. Originally trained in Economics, Susan is a 5x PyCon speaker, founder of Indie game studio Quill Game Studios and organizer of the 3700+ member Toronto Women's Data Group. Susan is also author of the upcoming O'Reilly book: Machine Learning Interviews. To learn how she finds time for all this and more, check out her personal site, susanshu.com, for her writings on focus optimization and daily routines.
#oreilly-showcase
Database Keynote
Peter Boncz (Amsterdam) @peterabcz
Peter Boncz (Wikipedia / Linkedin / homepage) has been active in the database community during the past four decades, making him a veteran. He leads the Database Architectures research group at research institute CWI in Amsterdam and has been involved in six startup companies so far. He was recently appointed ACM Fellow for his contributions to modern database architectures, and is also professor at VU University in Amsterdam, specializing in analytical databases. He is also the founder and chairman of the graph database organization Linked Data Benchmark Council (LDBC), though this year he is on leave from the latter function, during his sabbatical stay at MotherDuck.
Peter will be presenting the following session:
An abridged history of DuckDB: database tech from Amsterdam
#database
Knowledge Graph Keynote
Jans Aasman (SF Bay)
Jans Aasman (Wikipedia / LinkedIn) is a Ph.D. psychologist and expert in Cognitive Science - as well as CEO of Franz Inc., an early innovator in Artificial Intelligence and provider of the graph database, AllegroGraph. As both a scientist and CEO, Dr. Aasman continues to break ground in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge Graphs as he works hand-in- hand with numerous Fortune 500 organizations as well as US and Foreign governments. Dr. Aasman spent a large part of his professional life in telecommunications research, specializing in applied Artificial Intelligence projects and intelligent user interfaces. He gathered patents in the areas of speech technology, multimodal user interaction, recommendation engines while developing precursor technology for tablets and personal assistants. He was also a professor in the Industrial Design department of the Technical University of Delft. Dr. Aasman is a noted conference speaker at such events as Smart Data, NoSQL Now, International Semantic Web Conference, GeoWeb, AAAI, Enterprise Data World, Text Analytics, and TTI Vanguard to name a few.
Jans will present the following Knowledge Graphs Keynote:
Beyond Human Oversight: The Rise of Self-Building Knowledge Graphs in AI
Roopa Tangirala (SF Bay Area)
Roopa Tangirala is a seasoned engineering executive with over two decades of experience steering large scale data platforms, specializing in Database as a Service (DBaaS) and adept at cultivating and scaling high-performing teams to achieve exceptional results. In her current role, she is a Senior Engineering Director at ClickHouse, where her teams focus on building the foundational infrastructure components for ClickHouse Cloud. Before joining ClickHouse, Roopa dedicated 14.5 years to Netflix, where a substantial part of her tenure was focused on shaping the database landscape. Some of her contributions included Netflix’s cloud migration including spearheading the adoption of Cassandra and playing a key role in evolving and optimizing Netflix data platform by leveraging abstractions on top of Cassandra, ElasticSearch and different database solutions.
Roopa will present the following Database session:
From Open Source to SaaS: The ClickHouse Odyssey
Roy Hasson (Wrentham, Massachusetts)
Roy Hasson is the Head of Product at Upsolver where he works with customers globally to simplify how they build, manage and deploy data pipelines to deliver high quality data as a product. Sr Manager of Global Business Development for Analytics and Data Lakes at Amazon Web Services. Roy serves as an expert resource on big data architectures, data lakes and machine learning. Prior to AWS, Roy spent 15 years working with tier 1 service providers to design and deploy large data and telephone network systems.
Roy will present the following two sessions:
ELT and ETL are not products, technologies, or features.
Battle of the warehouses, lakehouses and streaming DBs, choose your platform wisely
#dataengineering
Dipankar Mazumdar (Toronto) @Dipankartnt
Dipankar Mazumdar (Linkedin / GitHub) is currently a Staff Data Advocate at ONEHOUSE, where he focuses on open-source projects such as Apache Hudi and Onetable to help engineering teams build and scale robust data analytics platforms. Before this, he worked on critical open-source projects such as Apache Iceberg and Apache Arrow at Dremio. For most of his career, Dipankar worked at the intersection of Data Visualization and Machine Learning. He also holds a Master's in Computer Science with a research area focused on ExplainableAI.
Dipankar will present the following Data Engineering session:
OneTable: Interoperate between Apache Hudi, Delta Lake & Apache Iceberg
Lindsay Murphy (Toronto)
Lindsay Murphy, a data expert with 12 years of industry experience, currently serves as the Head of Data at Secoda, a data search and discovery tool. She's led data functions at Toronto startups Maple and BenchSci, co-founded the 2000+ Toronto Modern Data Stack Meetup, and created and teaches an Advanced dbt course at Uplimit.
Lindsay will be presenting the following session:
Cost containment: Scaling your data function on a budget
#data-engineering
Megan Lieu (Washington DC)
Bitten early in life by the math bug, Megan Lieu began her career in finance working on transaction advisory and business valuations. Currently a Data Advocate at Deepnote, Megan is the author of two Linkedin Learning courses: Choose the Right Tool for Your Data and SQL for Finance Professionals.
Data Architecture Keynote
Jessica Talisman (Santa Cruz)
Jessica Talisman is a taxonomist, ontologist, information architect, and professional data wrangler. Over her 25 years of experience in the taxonomy world, Jessica has worked in galleries, libraries, museums, the federal government, e-commerce, and currently is Senior Manager, Taxonomy at System1. Jessica received her Master of Library and Information Science at Emporia State University. Check out Jessica’s recent interviews on the Monday Morning Data Chat and Discovering Data.
Data Leadership Keynote
Aaron Wilkerson (Detroit)
Aaron Wilkerson is the Sr. Manager of Data Strategy and Governance at Carhartt, where he is responsible for developing and delivering the company's enterprise data governance strategy. Aaron’s expertise lies in building and delivering data platforms that provide valuable insights to organizational leaders. His career spans over 15 years working in technical capacities across various industries, including Manufacturing, Financial Technology Services, Automotive, and Healthcare. Aaron is a frequent guest on well known data podcasts, most recently, Catalog and Cocktails, the Super Data Brothers, and the Tech Bros.
Veronika Durgin (Boston)
Veronika Durgin is Vice President of Data at Saks, the premier luxury ecommerce platform. In her role she is responsible for the data strategy at Saks from driving enterprise digital transformation and governing enterprise data, to enabling data efficiency and supporting analytics and reporting of the full customer shopping journey. Prior to joining Saks, she held various data engineering and management roles at tech-enabled sustainable agriculture company, Indigo, and Sonos, Inc. Veronika started her career as a database administrator focusing on performance tuning and optimization. Over the past two decades she has developed skills across database administration, data engineering, platform architecture, data modeling, and analytics and insights. Veronika is a Certified Data Vault Practitioner and a Snowflake Data Superhero. She is passionate about her profession and sharing knowledge with others. Veronika earned a master’s degree in computer software engineering from Brandeis University and a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, 2 boys, and a Rhodesian Ridgeback.
Michelle Yi (SF Bay Area) @ YulleYi
Michelle Yi is a technology leader that specializes in machine learning and cloud computing. She has 15 years of experience in the technology industry, contributed to the original IBM Watson showcased on Jeopardy, and enjoys building and leading teams that develop and deploy AI solutions to solve real-world problems. Michelle is passionate about diversity, STEM education/careers for our minority communities, and serves both on the board of Women in Data and as an avid volunteer for Girls Who Code.
Michelle will be presenting the following session:
Building Generative AI Applications: An LLM Case Study
Michelle will also be co-leading the following 90 minute hands-on workshop:
Causality: The Next Frontier of GenAI Explainability
#genai #graphday
Haikal Pribadi (London) @ haikalpribadi
Haikal Pribadi is a Computer Scientist and the Founder and CEO/CTO of Vaticle, the team behind TypeDB & TypeQL. TypeDB is a polymorphic database with a conceptual data model, a strong subtyping system, a symbolic reasoning engine, and a beautiful and elegant type-theoretic language: TypeQL. TypeDB empowers engineers around the world to tackle a higher order of complexity in data in advanced applications.
Haikal will be presenting the following session:
Type Theory as a Unifying Paradigm for Modern Databases
#database
Ryan Boyd (Boulder) @ ryguyrg
Ryan and Peter Boncz will co-present the following session:
DuckDB - Ask me anything
#database
Juha Korpela (Helsinki)
Juha Korpela, Chief Product Officer at Ellie.ai, is one of the leading data modeling experts in the Nordics. He is a strong advocate for always staying business-driven when designing new data architectures and believes that the future of data is in the hands of business users. Over the last decade, Juha has worked in multiple industries (such as manufacturing, banking, and the public sector) in a variety of high-profile data management roles. His main areas of expertise are data modeling, data warehousing, information architecture management, data mesh, and agile methodologies.
Jesse Anderson (Lisbon) @jessetanderson
One of our perennially requested speakers,
Ryan Mitchell (Boston) @Kludgist
An expert in web scraping, web security, and data science, Ryan Mitchell is a frequently requested speaker at data and security conferences. She has also taught and designed courses at Northeastern University and Olin College of Engineering. Ryan holds a master’s degree in software engineering from Harvard University Extension School and is currently a senior software engineer at the Gerson Lehrman Group where she creates data science tools. Ryan is author of the O'Reilly book Web Scraping with Python, soon to be in its third edition, as well as multiple Linkedin courses including: Python Data Structures with Trees and Web Scraping with Python.
#oreilly-showcase
Holden Karau ( San Francisco) @holdenkarau
Holden is the author of multiple O'Reilly publications, including Learning Spark, Kubeflow for Machine Learning, Scaling Spark with Ray, as well as two upcoming titles: Scaling Spark with Dask, and the 2nd edition of High Performance Spark.
#oreilly-showcase
Holden will present the following llm session:
Using LLMs to Fight Health Insurance Denials: From Data Synthesis to Production
#ai #llms #dataengineering
Malcolm Hawker (London)
Former Gartner Analyst and Profisee Head of Data Strategy,
Malcolm will be presenting the following session: Data Product Chaos
#data-products
William Lyon (SFBay) @lyonwj
Marko Budiselic (London)
Hubert Dulay (New York) @hkdulay
#oreilly-showcase
Jonathan Ellis (Austin) @spyced
Matthias Broecheler (Seattle) @mbroecheler
#oreilly-showcase
Brian Greene (Chicago)
Hala Nelson (Alexandria, Virginia)
Hala Nelson (Linkedin) is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at James Madison University. She has a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. Prior to her work at James Madison University, she was a postdoctoral Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan- Ann Arbor. Her research is in the areas of Materials Science, Statistical Mechanics, Inverse Problems, and the Mathematics of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. Her favorite subjects are Optimization, Numerical Algorithms, Mathematics for AI, Mathematical Analysis, Numerical Linear Algebra and Probability Theory. She likes to translate complex ideas into simple and practical terms. To her, most mathematical concepts are painless and relatable, unless the person presenting them either does not understand them very well, or is trying to show off. Other facts: Hala Nelson grew up in Lebanon, during the time of its brutal civil war. She lost her hair at a very young age in a missile explosion. This event and many that followed shaped her interests in human behavior, the nature of intelligence, and AI. Her father taught her Math, at home and in French, until she graduated high school. Her favorite quote from her father about math is, "It is the one clean science''. Hala is author of the recent O'Reilly book: Essential Math for AI.
#oreilly-showcase
Adi Polak (Israel) @AdiPolak
Adi Polak brings her vast industry research and engineering experience to bear in educating and helping teams design, architect, and build cost-effective data systems and machine learning pipelines that emphasize scalability, expertise, and business goals. Adi is a frequent worldwide presenter and the author of the recent O'Reilly book, Machine Learning With Apache Spark. She is continually an invited member of multiple program committees and advisor for conferences like Data & AI Summit, Scale by the Bay, and others. Previously, she was a senior manager for Azure at Microsoft, where she focused on building advanced analytics systems and modern architectures. When Adi isn’t building data pipelines or thinking up new software architecture, you can find her on the local cultural scene or at the beach.
#oreilly-showcase
Santona Tuli (Washington DC)
Matthew Housley (Salt Lake city)
Co-Founder / CTO of Ternary Data as well as fellow “Recovering Data Scientist,” , Matthew Housley is also a “Reformed Academic,” holding a PhD in Math and dual Masters degrees in both Math and Physics. It was only natural that he began his career in Academia as a Professor of Mathematics, before joining one of the largest e-commerce companies as a data scientist. Matt's STEM background in combination with his knack for teaching makes him a mastermind at overhauling processes, improving teamwork, and incorporating engineering best practices so that real value is delivered to companies. While making the journey from data scientist to data engineer, Matt began to focus more on data & cloud engineering, working extensively with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Containers, Apache Airflow and GPUs, among other technologies. Matt (or should we say, “Dr. Housley”) is an adjunct faculty member in the David Eccles School of Business at The University of Utah. Joe is co-host of the popular Monday Morning Data Chat (Spotify / Apple) and co-author of the bestselling O'Reilly book: Fundamentals of Data Engineering.
#oreilly-showcase
Bill Inmon (Castle Rock, Colorado)
Monica Miller (Dallas) @Moni4489
Jon Haddad (Los Angeles)
With over 20 years of industry experience, much of that leading teams and helping to architect and scale large systems,
Juan Sequeda (Austin) @juansequeda
Juan has researched and developed technology on semantic data virtualization, graph data modeling, schema mapping and data integration methodologies. He pioneered technology to construct knowledge graphs from relational databases, resulting in W3C standards, research awards, patents, software and his startup Capsenta acquired by data.world in 2019. Juan strives to build bridges between academia and industry as past co-chair of the LDBC Property Graph Schema Working Group, member of the LDCB Graph Query Languages task force, standards editor at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and organizing committees of scientific conferences, including being the general chair of The Web Conference 2023. Juan is the co-author of the book Designing and Building Enterprise Knowledge Graphs and the co-host of Catalog and Cocktails, an honest, no-bs, non-salesy data podcast.
Chris Tabb (London)
Chris Tabb, co-founder of LEIT DATA started his career in the Business Intelligence/Analytics domain 30 years ago. Beginning at Cognos in the 90’s working in the back office before becoming an expert in all their products, and leaving to become an independent BI consultant in 1998. Chris has followed the evolution of the analytics industry, working hands-on with all the technologies in the ecosystems: – Databases, ETL/ELT, BI/OLAP /Visualisation Tools, Big Data Technologies, Infrastructure On premises / Cloud across many vendors, some old some new. Recently with a focus on the Modern Data Stack Evolution Chris has started many movements with a focus on Business Value using a number of hashtags to raise awareness #bringbackdatamodelling / #bringbackdatamodeling #bringbackdocumention under the umbrella of the #meandatastreets that is focused on simplification of the Data Platform architecture and to focus on Business Value.
Andy Petrella (Liège, Belgium) @noootsab
Andy Petrella
#oreilly-showcase
Ron Itelman (Denver) @ron_itelman
Ron will be presenting the following session: Invisible Threats and Data Hygiene: The Hidden Value Data Products
#data-products #oreilly-showcase
Mary MacCarthy (Los Angeles) @MaryMacCarthy
Mary MacCarthy is the VP of Marketing at the product analytics platform Kubit and the co-host of the Tech Bros on Linkedin and Youtube. Mary pivoted into data and tech after a long career as an international television correspondent–and she takes pride in applying a journalist’s critical eye to the good, the bad, and the ugly in data, AI, and tech.
Ryan Dolley (Detroit)
Ryan Dolley is a data consultant specializing in BI and analytics, author of the Super Data Blog, and one half of the Super Data Brothers. Check out his discussion on the evolution of BI and moving beyond dashboards on a recent episode of the Joe Reis Show.
David Hughes (Seattle)
David Hughes is the Principal Graph Consultant for Graphable. He has 10 years of experience designing and building graph solutions which surface meaningful insights. His background includes clinical practice, medical research, software development, and cloud architecture. David has worked in healthcare and biotech within the intensive care, interventional radiology, oncology, cardiology, and proteomics domains. He enjoys endurance running, hiking, and spending time with his family in the outdoors when he is not enabling clients to have data epiphanies from their complex data.
Sean Robinson (Charlotte)
Alex Merced (Winter Park, FL) @alexmerced
Alex Merced (Linkedin) is a Developer Advocate at Dremio with a history of creating content to enable developers of all types through his personal projects like DevNursery.com, The Web Dev 101 Podcast, and the DataNation podcast. Alex Merced has been a developer with companies like Crossfield Digital, CampusGuard, GenEd Systems and others along with being an Instructor for General Assembly Bootcamps. Alex is co-author of the upcoming O'Reilly book: Apache Iceberg: The Definitive Guide.
#oreilly-showcase
Ryan Wisnesky (Cambridge, Massachusetts )
Ryan Wisnesky (LinkedIn) obtained B.S. and M.S. degrees in mathematics and computer science from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard University, where he studied the design and implementation of provably correct software systems. Previously, he was a postdoctoral associate in the MIT department of mathematics, where he developed the categorical query language CQL. He currently leads open-source and commercial development of CQL as CTO of Conexus AI. He maintains an active collaboration with the information-integration department of IBM Research, where he contributed to the Clio, Orchid, and HIL projects.
