5:30pm - 6:30pm 

Registration and Reception

Share a poster on your Spark research or application on our Innovation Wall! Please indicate your topic on the registration form to confirm your participation.

6:30pm - 7:20pm
 

Keynote and Special Announcements
"The Business Value of Spark"

Ritika Gunnar, Vice President of Offering Management, IBM Analytics

• Ritika Gunnar has worked in development and pre-sales enablement and currently leads offering management for IBM Analytics. Ritika strongly believes in the power of education for today's youth and spends a lot of time advocating and mentoring young women interested in science and engineering. She is a native of Austin and has an MBA and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin.

Srisatish Ambati, CEO, H2O

• Sri Ambati is co-founder and CEO of 0xdata (@hexadata), the builders of H2O. H2O democratizes big data science and makes Hadoop do math for better predictions. Before 0xdata, Sri spent time scaling R over big data with researchers at Purdue and Stanford. Prior to that Sri co-founded Platfora and was the Director of Engineering at DataStax. Before that Sri was Partner & Performance engineer at java multi-core startup, Azul Systems, tinkering with the entire ecosystem of enterprise apps at scale. Before that Sri was at sabbatical pursuing Theoretical Neuroscience at Berkeley. Prior to that Sri worked on nosql trie based index for semistructured data at in-memory index startup RightOrder. Sri is known for his knack for envisioning killer apps in fast evolving spaces and assembling stellar teams towards productizing that vision. A regular speaker in the BigData, NoSQL and Java circuit, Sri leaves trail @srisatish.
  

J.J. Allaire, Founder & CEO, RStudio

• JJ is software engineer and entrepreneur who builds tools that empower people with technology. JJ has conceived and designed several industry leading products by balancing market, customer, and technical considerations, and by maintaining intimate involvement in all aspects of software design and construction.
  

Dr. Seth Dobrin, Director of Digital Strategies, Monsanto

• Dr. Seth Dobrin is currently responsible for designing the strategy for Monsanto's journey through digital transformation including cultural, behavioral and operational aspects.  Prior to this role he lead efforts to reimagine how Monsanto needs to think about and leverage data and data science differently to be a data driven company. Dr Dobrin holds a PhD in Neuropsychiatric Genetics, and has worked in academic, start-up and corporate environments throughout his career.

Robbie Strickland, Vice President, Software Engineering, The Weather Company

• Robbie works for The Weather Company, leading the team that builds data analysis services for the digital business, serving the likes of weather.com, Weather Underground, and the TWC mobile apps. He has been involved in the Cassandra project since 2010 and has contributed in a variety of ways over the years, including work on drivers for Scala and C#, the Hadoop and Spark integrations, heading up the Atlanta Cassandra Users Group, and answering lots of Stack Overflow questions. He has been selected as a Cassandra MVP for 2015 and 2016.
  

7:20pm - 8:00pm
 

Panel discussion with top data science leaders: "How to Make Apache Spark Business Applications"

Moderator - Ritika Gunnar, Vice President of Offering Management, IBM Analytics

• Ritika Gunnar has worked in development and pre-sales enablement and currently leads offering management for IBM Analytics. Ritika strongly believes in the power of education for today's youth and spends a lot of time advocating and mentoring young women interested in science and engineering. She is a native of Austin and has an MBA and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin.
  
  

John Akred, Chief Technology Officer, Silicon Valley Data Science

• With over 15 years in advanced analytical applications and architecture, John is dedicated to helping organizations become more data-driven. He combines deep expertise in analytics and data science with business acumen and dynamic engineering leadership.
  
  

Todd Holloway, Director of Content Science and Algorithms, Netflix

• Todd Holloway is a Big Data expert whose career has oscillated between two equally interesting areas—artificial intelligence and data visualization. His AI work has spanned projects with Amazon, AT&T, TheFind, Trulia, and Netflix. His visualization work has been featured in a number of exhibits and publications. He is a lecturer at the Berkley School of Information.
  
  

Matthew Conley - Data Scientist, Tesla Motors

• Matthew Conley has years of hands on experience with scalable data technologies such as Spark, AWS, and MapReduce. He worked on PinStack, a knowledge recommendation engine for Data Science topics in Stack Exchange. Before Tesla Motors, he worked at Boeing.
  
  

Nick Pentreath, Spark Committer and STC Engineer, IBM

• Nick Pentreath is a member of the Apache Spark Project Management Committee. He has a background in financial markets, machine learning, and software development, including experience as a research scientist at the online ad targeting start-up Cognitive Match Limited in London and leading the Data Science and Analytics team at Mxit, Africa's largest social network. He is also one of the cofounders of Graphflow, a big data and machine learning company focused on user-centric recommendations and customer intelligence. He now works at the Spark Technology Center.
  
  

Siddha Ganju, Computational Data Science, Carnegie Mellon University

• Siddha Ganju is a master’s student of computational data science at Carnegie Mellon University and was a 2015 summer openlab intern at CERN. She has implemented several projects at the junction of machine learning, natural language processing, and information retrieval, and her research also touches on deep learning. Siddha has a bachelor’s degree from the National Institute of Technology, Hamirpur, India.
  

Dr. Eitel J.M. Lauría, Professor and Graduate Director at the School of CS & Math, Lead Data Scientist of the Learning Analytics, Marist College

• Marist College has been recognized by premier technology organizations for their work in the learning analytics space, including awards from Campus Technology and Computerworld. Dr. Lauría has extensive experience in the IT industry, having consulted with companies such as IBM, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, Reuters, and GE. In Argentina he was a managing partner at GLD Consultores, and a faculty member and chair of the MIS Dept. at the School of Business, Universidad del Salvador. He holds an Electrical Engineering degree from University of Buenos Aires, an MBA from Universidad del Salvador, and a PhD in Information Science from University at Albany, SUNY.
  

8:00pm - 9:30pm
 

Food, Drink and Data
Maker Demonstrations with Apache Spark.