Data scientist has become an increasingly popular job title over the past few years, and has even been labeled the "best job to pursue" in 2016. What does a data scientist do, though? On a daily basis, what are they working on? Maybe most importantly, do data scientists have a favorite Disney prince/princess? Join us as we discuss these questions (along with others) from data scientists in Colorado.
****Meet your Panelists****
**Diana Pfeil**
Diana (@dianam) is a data scientist and speaker on the topics of data and optimization.
She’s CTO at Resilient Ops, a startup focused on improving the air travel experience for passengers. She also teaches business analytics at CU Denver's business school and co-organizers the data meetup Analyze Boulder. Previously, she was a software engineer in the machine learning group at Amazon, where she worked on customer behavior-based search and building a large-scale key value store. She holds a PhD from MIT, where her research focused on predicting optimal air traffic routes during thunderstorms. When she's not data scienceing, Diana spends a lot of time at playgrounds with her two little kids.
**Josh Montague**
Josh (@jrmontag) is a data scientist at Twitter, working within Twitter's data business (Gnip) to help its customers collect and analyze Twitter data for use in their products. He has worked with university research groups, scrappy startups, and global CPG companies on projects that help them incorporate the pulse of the planet into their own processes and systems.
**Erika Henry**
Erika is a research and data scientist specializing in research design, data analysis, and visualization. She currently works at the National Committee for Quality Assurance in Washington, D.C. where her efforts focus on designing ways to measure and improve healthcare quality in the United States. Specifically, her work involves (1) building interactive dashboards for data exploration, visualization, and analysis, (2) optimizing methodology for assessing healthcare quality, and (3) designing methodological approaches to assess patient experiences that can be utilized for quality improvement efforts. When not working, she collaborates with other data scientists on developing tactics to swindle math and physics professors in weekly poker games.
**Matt Fornito**
Matt is the Director of Analytics and Principal Data Scientist at OpsVision Solutions, LLC a consulting firm specializing in cloud solutions and big data. Previously he spearheaded analytics for SlingTV by leveraging advanced machine learning techniques (e.g. gradient boosted trees, random forests, neural networks, etc.), built models to allocate 10 billion dollars of spend for Dish’s CEO, led the segmentation campaign at Sports Authority to drive executive strategy and marketing processes, and built models to predict top performers in fantasy football. Matt’s an avid craft beer & scotch drinker. He also partakes in adrenaline seeking activities such as great white shark diving, bungee jumping, and flying planes.
****Schedule****
6:30 - 7:00 : Arrival time and networking
7:00 - 8:00 : Panel questions
8:00 - 8:30 : Conclusion and Networking
As a last note, I will be moderating, and figuring out what questions to ask/discuss as well. I'd like to have questions from you all, so if you think of any please shoot them my way (sean.sall@galvanize.com), or comment on the meetup page here. Thanks!
Please RSVP and help expedite check-in by registering via the eventbrite here: http://bit.ly/1q3AbAL.