To kick things off, Chloe Kwon and Kevin Horecka will be telling you briefly, but enthusiastically, about Data in the News! What models, discoveries, and tools were in the news during the month of April and May? Come to the event and find out!

In our second Data on Tap event, Matthew Tichenor will be talking about fraud in Texas's Unemployment Insurance (UI) system. Texas's UI program is managed by the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) and is fairly big, regularly paying out millions of dollars each month. Fraudsters regularly collect from and cheat the system, through a number of schemes. One particularly nasty scheme is when fraudsters use a stolen identity to file a claim and collect UI benefits. Matthew will discuss the problem and some of the solutions he implemented to detect identity theft in UI claims, which include network analysis, supervised machine learning algorithms and unsupervised machine algorithms.

We welcome inputs from interested Data Science enthusiasts and professionals on these ideas, techniques, and their implementation as well as any other questions or comments. Our goal is to make this event fun and informative!

Agenda:

6:30 - Door opens / beer and snacks / meet the speaker and members
7:00 - 7:15 - Data in the News
7:15 - 8:00 - Talk + Q&A
8:00 - 8:30 - Discussion / Come talk to the speaker!

Everyone is welcome. Beer and snacks will be provided.