Alum Talk

Dear Alumni,

It is our pleasure to invite you to the first edition of the Alum Talks. The concept is simple: once a quarter, we invite two alumni to present on some interesting topic related to a project they worked on, a technique they learned, or some data science adventure they've been on. Each alumni will talk for about 20 mins followed by a Q&A session.

WHERE? NEW Alliance Building, 901 Main Campus Drive, Suite 130 (first floor), Centennial campus. Parking will be available in Alliance parking deck (right behind the building). The talks will also be broadcasted live online, so that anyone can attend from anywhere! The link to attend online will be sent a few days prior to the event.

WHEN? October 11 at 630pm EST. Talks will start at 630 but doors will be open at 6.

WHAT? Our two speakers for the first edition are:

Steve Neola (IAA 2014, eBay, New York City, NY) will be presenting live from New York. He will talk about a research paper he and his team published and presented at RecSys 2016, a conference series on recommender systems. He will go into the details of the paper and how they apply these techniques at eBay.

Peter Baumgartner (IAA 2014, RTI International, RTP, NC) will talk about a project that attempts to understand public perception of public health issues through social media. In particular Peter's team focused on how communities of followers form around Twitter accounts of medical marijuana dispensaries in California. He'll walk us through how they used community detection algorithms and social network analysis to better understand how these communities are structured and what this says about the consumer space.

We're very excited by these two presentations and we look forward to the event!

Cheers,

The IAA Alumni Association Team

PS: The event will be followed by a happy hour at Bada Wings in Mission Valley.