Meet the KDD 2015 Invited Industry and Government Speakers
As we approach KDD-2015, the largest and highest quality conference on Data Mining, Data Science, and Knowledge Discovery, we want to introduce you to the amazing invited speakers we have lined up in the Industry and Government invited talks program that focuses on applications: deployed, real-world applications in industry and government, with quantifiable value delivered. These talks presents a rare opportunity to hear from the very best about the most exciting topics when it comes to building highly scalable platforms and deploying real applications. The speakers will share key insights from their experiences and present valuable lessons learned.
Our theme this year is Data Science and Big Data. This is a rapidly growing sector of our industry and promises to bring nothing less than one of the biggest disruptions ever to hit the Data and Analytics world since its inception. To give you an idea of what we are talking about, we draw on a recent article by Forbes that proclaimed the market will exceed USD $50 Billion by 2018. This market was barely $6 Billion in 2012! In addition, these figures do not account for the Analytics Industry, which in 2015, is estimated to total USD $135 Billion! (see the Forbes article if you find the numbers intriguing).
Whether the industry size estimates will bear out or not, we believe that the Big Data revolution is upon us, and it will change everything. This technology is what enabled Google and other search companies to index the entire world wide web (or at least the visible part of it) — which at last count had about 1 billion sites with 3 billion global users online (see: the Internet live stats). And now the same Big Data technology has been “democratized” and made available to all via the Hadoop open source initiative. So our list of invited speakers features Amr Awadallah, the co-founder and CTO of Cloudera, the biggest company that supports the open source releases of Hadoop. We also believe that the use of analytics technology on the cloud will be an essential part of tomorrow. For that, we bring to you Joseph Sirosh, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft responsible for the cloud offering of machine learning and data mining algorithms. Joseph left his critical position at Amazon to join Microsoft to launch these services. Microsoft recently bought Revolution Analytics, one of the largest supporters of the open source R project for statistical analysis.
This year, we are also focusing on Open Source as a theme, and we have invited several speakers to cover this important area and its impact on Analytics. Chris White ran the famous XDATA Program at DARPA where he created the largest library of open source sophisticated analytics packages. He will tell us all about the treasures in this program before Microsoft recruited him away. Bassel Ojjeh will share with us major lessons learned from leveraging open source and deploying a large-scale analytics platforms in open source. He will also cover the issues you need to think about as you leverage the “free” open source software available for Analytics.
The full list of speakers includes luminaries and very senior execs from public companies that are major players in Analytics including Adobe, LinkedIn, Visa, and Rocket Fuel along with speakers who run high impact applications.
In the next few days, we will blog about each of the speakers and the topics they will cover. So please stay tuned and track this blog. More importantly, we hope to see you at Sydney and have you partake in the opportunity to meet our speakers in person and to participate in the lively discussion that will take place.
Stay tuned, and see you in Sydney on August 10.
Usama and Rajesh - co–chairs of Invited Talks Track
Usama Fayyad, Chief Data Officer, Barclays
Rajesh Parekh, VP Data Science, GroupOn
