Seven data science talks to catch at GHC 2016
The Grace Hopper conference is right around the corner. Anu and I have presented at the conference multiple times, and it has always been an action-packed 3 days full of excitement and great sessions. The most interesting trend for data geeks like us has been the transition of data science from academia to becoming the hottest career track for college graduates.
We’re very excited to see that there are many more in-depth sessions that focus on real-life use cases of data and science and how it’s being used to solve specific problems. Are you interested in data engineering or the data science field? If yes, then don’t miss out on these great sessions:
Thursday, October 20th
- 10:30 am — 10:50 am: Personalized Content Blending in the Pinterest Homefeed — Understanding how Pinterest is personalizing your content feed is an interesting topic by itself. We may also hear more about blending of multiple ranking algorithms used to compose a single unified personalized feed that is now a go-to destination for many.
- 11:10 am — 11:30 am: Recommendation of Items with Short Life Span — All recommendation systems suffer from the cold start problem, and a common solution that works well involves leveraging user profile data in targeting content to improve on recommendations. But how does one build a profile for ephemeral content? This talk covers techniques to solve the cold start problem, when items that make up your content are short-lived (seasonal, single-use or items sold on eBay and part of classifieds or online garage sales or yard sales).
- 1:00 pm — 2:00 pm: Search and Discovery: Beyond Ten Blue Links — This panel consists of leaders from Salesforce, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Airbnb and Yelp. Each have some specific use cases for search. Pinterest with image search, Salesforce with enterprise search, LinkedIn, Airbnb and Yelp probably have very specific metrics around the relevance based on intent, location and other factors. Should be interesting! Lisa Quin (Airbnb) and Francis Haugen (Pinterest) will also be joining us at an after-hours data science meetup event at the Four Seasons. If you’re interested in hearing more, RSVP and join us for this event.
- 2:30 pm — 2:50 pm: How the World Bank Uses Social Network Analysis to Support Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries — Learn how WorldBank data scientists are employing unstructured data analysis combined with social graph and geospatial data to make economic policy decisions more data driven in cities as diverse as Medellin, Cairo and Beirut.
- 5:30 pm: Data Science Meetup — This meetup features talks from data scientists, product managers and data engineers from Netflix, Intuit, Pinterest, Uber, Insight Data Science and Airbnb. It highlights the fact that in the tech industry, data science spans different job functions. You could be a product manager, an engineer or a data scientist who focuses on data science. This is not a GHC event, so you will need to RSVP to secure a spot. (I am helping organize this event so consider this a mildly biased recommendation :))
Friday, October 21st
- 10:30 am — 11:30 am: Introduction to Programming Humanoid Robots with Emotional Intelligence — While this is technically in the realm of AI, I am fascinated by this topic. Even better — this is a workshop that is designed to help you understand what it means to build robots that can respond to human emotion. If you plan on attending, make sure you download and install Choregraphe before the workshop: https://developer.softbankrobotics.com/us-en/downloads/pepper
- 10:50 am–11:10 am: Now that you have data — what’s next? From data to anomalous alerts and everything in between — One of the biggest challenges in building data pipelines is resiliency. This talk is about how to use anomaly-based systems to detect issues with the data or parts of the pipeline. I look forward to some takeaways with general applicability to anyone building data pipelines, even if the talk focuses on the APIs open sourced by Microsoft.
Last but certainly not the least, try and catch the keynotes from Megan Smith, CTO of the United States and Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce on Friday. Note that these are later in the day, so if you were planning on leaving the conference early Friday, you would miss it.
Mita Mahadevan is a group engineering manager for the Intuit Data Engineering & Analytics organization. She leads the development of Intuit’s AB Testing, Personalization and real time Streaming platform. You can follow her @mita_m2.
