Confirmed Speakers
Opening Keynote
Jesse Anderson (Reno) @jessetanderson
Jesse Anderson is a data engineer, creative engineer, and managing director of the Big Data Institute. He works with companies ranging from startups to Fortune 100 companies on Big Data. This includes training on cutting edge technologies like Apache Kafka, Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark. He has taught over 30,000 people the skills to become data engineers. He is widely regarded as an expert in the field and for his novel teaching practices. Jesse is published on O’Reilly and Pragmatic Programmers. He has been covered in prestigious publications such as The Wall Street Journal, CNN, BBC, NPR, Engadget, and Wired. You can learn more about Jesse at Jesse-Anderson.com.
Jesse will present the following data science session: Working Together as Data Teams.
On the day before (Friday), Jesse will also be hosting a full day Professional Kafka Development Workshop. You can register for the class here.
AI Health Data Keynote
Dr. Ying Ding (Austin)
Dr. Ying Ding is the Bill & Lewis Suit Professor of Information Technology at the University of Texas School of Information. Before that, she was a professor and director of graduate studies for data science program at School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University. She has led the effort to develop the online data science graduate program for Indiana University. She also worked as a senior researcher at Department of Computer Science, University of Innsburck (Austria) and Free University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands). She has been involved in various NIH, NSF and European-Union funded projects. She has published 240+ papers in journals, conferences, and workshops, and served as the program committee member for 200+ international conferences. She is the co-editor of book series called Semantic Web Synthesis by Morgan & Claypool publisher, the co-editor-in-chief for Data Intelligence published by MIT Press and Chinese Academy of Sciences, and serves as the editorial board member for several top journals in Information Science and Semantic Web. She is the co-founder of Data2Discovery company advancing cutting edge AI technologies in drug discovery and healthcare. Her current research interests include data-driven science of science, AI in healthcare, Semantic Web, knowledge graph, data science, scholarly communication, and the application of Web technologies.
Professor Ding will present the AI health Data keynote session: Knowledge Graph for Drug Discovery.
Human in the Loop Keynote
Robert Munro (San Francisco ) @WWRob
Robert Munro (LinkedIn) is an expert in combining Human and Machine Intelligence, working with Machine Learning approaches to Text, Speech, Image and Video Processing. Robert has founded several AI companies, building some of the top teams in Artificial Intelligence. He has worked in many diverse environments, from Sierra Leone, Haiti and the Amazon, to London, Sydney and Silicon Valley, in organizations ranging from startups to the United Nations. In addition to publishing more than 50 papers, Robert is the author of the upcoming Manning publication Human in the Loop Machine Learning. He has a PhD from Stanford University.
Rob will present the following Human in the Loop keynote: Human Centered Machine Learning.
Database Keynote
Dr. Marko A. Rodriguez (Santa Fe) @twarko
Dr. Marko A. Rodriguez (LinkedIn) is a graph and stream computing specialist currently focused on designing stream-based virtual machines for processing graph-based structures within distributed computing environments. Marko is the co-founder of Apache TinkerPop where he is developing the next generation TinkerPop4 virtual machine and bytecode specification that will enable the natural integration of any data processor and query language. Marko is also the founder of RReduX which, along with developing TinkerPop4, is designing a universal distributed computer called GMachine. Dr. Rodriguez received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at Santa Cruz and was a Director's Fellow at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Dr. Rodriguez will present the following session: mm-ADT : A Multi-Model Abstract Data Type
Knowledge Graph Keynote
Juan Sequeda (Austin) @juansequeda
Dr. Juan Sequeda is the co-founder of Capsenta, a spin-off from his research, and the Senior Director of Capsenta Labs. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests are on the intersection of Logic and Data and in particular between the Semantic Web and Relational Databases for data integration, ontology based data access and semantic/graph data management. Juan is the recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, received 2nd Place in the 2013 Semantic Web Challenge for his work on ConstituteProject.org, Best Student Research Paper at the 2014 International Semantic Web Conference and the 2015 Best Transfer and Innovation Project awarded by Institute for Applied Informatics. Juan is the General Chair of AMW 2018, was the PC chair of the ISWC 2017 In-Use track, is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Web Semantics, member of multiple program committees (ISWC, ESWC, WWW, AAAI, IJCAI) and co-creator of the Consuming Linked Data Workshop series. Juan is a member of the Graph Query Languages task force of the Linked Data Benchmark Council (LDBC) and has also been an invited expert member and standards editor at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
Juan will present the following session: A Brief History of Knowledge Graph's Main Ideas
TinkerPop Keynote
Joshua Shinavier (San Francisco) @joshsh
Joshua Shinavier is a primordial being of the graph database domain. As a co-founder of what is now Apache TinkerPop, he contributed to the first common APIs for graph databases, the original TinkerPop query language which influenced Gremlin, and the first tools which aligned the property graph and RDF data models, starting with neo4j-rdf-sail in 2008. At Uber, he leads the company-wide effort to unify data models and schemas across RPC, streaming, and storage. The scope of this effort includes developing standardized schemas, propagating standardized schemas throughout the company's infrastructure, developing mappings to integrate data across languages and environments, and getting as much as possible of Uber's data connected in the form of a graph of entities and relationships, facilitating data discovery and automated query planning. Joshua holds a PhD in computer science from RPI's Tetherless World Constellation, where he took the opportunity to explore the strange no man's land between graphs, cognition, and augmented reality. He feels, now as always, that the research, business, and open source communities have a lot to learn from each other with respect to graphs and knowledge representation.
Josh will present the following TinkerPop Keynote: TinkerPop 2020.
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. Jans recently authored an IEEE article on “Enterprise Knowledge Graphs”.
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.
Dr. Aasman will present the following session: Creating Explainable AI With Rules.
Jeff Carpenter (Scottsdale, Arizona) @jscarp
Jeff Carpenter (Linkedin) , co-author of Cassandra: The Definitive Guide (3rd edition available soon!), has worked on large-scale systems in the defense and hospitality industries. Jeff leads the Developer Advocate team at DataStax, where he uses his background in system architecture, microservices and Apache Cassandra to help empower developers and operations engineers to build distributed systems that are scalable, reliable, and secure.
Jeff will be giving the following Cassandra presentation: Cassandra 4.0 In Action
Sanghamitra Deb (SF Bay) @sangha_deb
Sanghamitra Deb is a Data Scientist at Chegg, where she works on problems related school and college education to sustain and improve the learning process. Her work involves recommendation systems, graph modeling, deep NLP analysis , data pipelines and machine learning. Previously, Sanghamitra was a data scientist at a Accenture where she worked on a wide variety of problems related data modeling, architecture and visual story telling. Sanghamitra is active in Data Science outreach and believes in applying analytics to a range of domains such as pharma, HR, customer support, market research, etc. Prior to being data scientist she was an astrophysicist who studied the structure of the universe by modeling galaxy clusters.
Sanghamitra will present the following session: How to start your first computer vision project.
Justin Fine (Los Angeles)
Justin Fine is based in Los Angeles, CA and is a Sales Engineer working mainly in the SoCal region. His academic background is applied mathematics and has worked with graphs for over 12 years in many different verticals while consulting (federal, telecoms, financial, etc). During this time as a consultant his focus was mainly advanced analytics utilizing NoSQL technologies. He recently comes from Microsoft's Azure team where he was a Data Solution architect and is very excited to be part of the Neo4j family! When Justin isn't nerding he enjoys scotch, cigars, and reading with his cat Penny.
Justin will co-present the following session: Graph Feature Engineering for More Accurate Machine Learning (90 minute workshop)
Alon Gavra is a platform team lead at AppsFlyer. Originally a backend developer, he’s transitioned to lead the real time infrastructure team and took on the role of bringing some of the most heavily used infrastructure in AppsFlyer to the next level. A strong believer in sleep-driven design, Alon’s main focus is stability and resiliency in building massive data ingestion and storage solutions.
Alon will present the following Data Engineering session: Managing your Kafka in an explosive growth environment.
Anna Lisa Gentile (San Jose ) @anligentile
Dr. Anna Lisa Gentile (LinkedIn) is a Researcher at IBM Research Almaden. Her research is principally focused on studying methods and techniques for semantic annotating unstructured and semi-structured content. Her main Research Areas are Information Extraction (IE), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Semantic Web. She obtained her PhD with a thesis on Named Entity Disambiguation at the University of Bari, Italy in 2010. She has published more than 60 peer-reviewed scientific publications including papers at major venues such as LREC, EMNLP, ESWC and ISWC. She has been serving as Organizing Committee member for conferences such as ISWC, ESWC, WWW amongst many others and organized workshop series such as LD4IE on Linked Data for Information Extraction and HumBL on Augmenting Intelligence with Bias-Aware Humans- in-the-Loop.
Dr. Gentile will present the following Human in the Loop session session: Information Extraction with Humans in the Loop.
Tanner Gilligan (SF Bay)
Tanner Gilligan has a passion for both AI and software architecture, and combines these skills in order to lead the platform development at Sculpt. Originally, Tanner grew up in Minnesota where he worked full time during high-school, and moved to California for college and better weather. He completed his B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science (AI) at Stanford University in only four years, and graduated with distinction for being at the top of his class. Prior to Sculpt, he gained hands-on AI experience at TrueCar, Oracle, and several clients while working as a ML consultant.
Tanner will co-present the following Human in the Loop session: From Stanford to Startup: making academic human-in-the-loop technology work in the real world.
Tyler Glaittli (Midvale, Utah)
Tyler Glaittli is a Business Systems Analyst on the Enterprise Data Management team at CHG Healthcare. He's passionate about bridging the gap between business users and technology and has a knack for simplifying and modeling complex systems. With help from Graphileon, he is taming, visualizing, and revealing the complex relationships in 40 years of healthcare staffing data. Outside of work, he's the General Manager of Random Tangent Improv Comedy, a nonprofit that teaches and performs the art of improvised comedy.
Tyler will co-present the following Global Graph Summit session: Managing Relationships in the Healthcare Industry with Graphileon: A CHG Healthcare Use Case.
Abe Gong (San Francisco ) @AbeGong
Abe Gong (LinkedIn) is CEO and cofounder at Superconductive Health. A seasoned entrepreneur, Abe has been leading teams using data and technology to solve problems in healthcare, consumer wellness, and public policy for over a decade. Previously, he was chief data officer at Aspire Health, the founding member of the Jawbone data science team, and lead data scientist at Massive Health. Abe holds a PhD in public policy, political science, and complex systems from the University of Michigan. He speaks and writes regularly on data science, healthcare, and the internet of things.
Abe will co-present the following Data Engineering session: Fighting pipeline debt with Great Expectations.
