Global Big Data Conference: Dr. Usama Fayyad Speaker

Unstructured Data and the BigData platforms force a disruptive change that left most enterprises in a major Data Chaos. The combination of economic drivers in enterprise computing, the need to leverage semi-structured and unstructured Data, and the emergence of the Internet of Things (IOT) is driving a dramatic shift in the Enterprise Data landscape. Hadoop and the Open Source have accelerated the changes to a point of confusion. Today’s data analyst faces a bewildering environment of technologies and challenges involving semi-structured and unstructured data with access methodologies that have almost no relation to the past. An equal confusion is faced by IT and business users. Data Scientists end up spending their valuable time dealing with many issues but core Data Science. In the meantime, the ability to drive significant business value from “Data Assets” has never been greater. With rapid developments in AI and Machine Learning, the need to systematically and automatically leverage the proper data assets has become even more urgent. This talk will cover: 1 Why is BigData different and Economic drivers for change in storage technology 2 issues and challenges in how to make the benefits of advanced analytics fit within the application environment. 3 The requirement for Real-time data streaming and analysis is stronger than ever. 4 Why Data Science and several related fields like AI, Macine learning have become critical to almost all future analytical tasks. 5 How every company is becoming a BigData company, even the smallest of organizations 6 4 real case studies to demonstrate and discuss the challenges and the great opportunities for BigData and Data Science.

Usama Fayyad is CEO of Open Insights in Silicon Valley which he reactivated after leaving Barclays in London. He is also Interim CTO for Stella.AI a Mountain View, CA VC-Funded startup in AI for recruitment. He is acting as Chief Operations & Technology Officer for MTN’s new division: MTN2.0 aiming to extend Africa’s largest telco into new revenue streams beyond Voice & Data. Until October 2016 he was Group Chief Data Officer at Barclays in London where his global responsibilities included the Data Strategy, Data Governance, performance and management of operational and analytical data systems, as well as delivering value by using BigData and analytics to create growth opportunities and cost savings for the bank. Usama is co-founder of OASIS-500, a tech startup investment fund, following his appointment as Founding Executive Chairman in 2010 by King Abdullah II of Jordan. He was also Chairman, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Blue Kangaroo Corp, a mobile search engine service for offers based in Silicon Valley 2011-2013. In 2008, Usama founded Open Insights, a US-based data strategy, technology and consulting firm that helps enterprises deploy data-driven solutions that effectively and dramatically grow revenue and competitive advantage. Prior to this, he served as Yahoo!’s Chief Data Officer and Executive Vice President where he was responsible for Yahoo!’s global data strategy, architecting its data policies and systems, and managing its data analytics and data processing infrastructure. The data teams he built at Yahoo! collected, managed, and processed over 25 terabytes of data per day, and drove a major part of ad targeting revenue and data insights businesses globally. He was the first person in the world to hold the CDO title. In 2003 Usama co-founded and led the DMX Group, a data mining and data strategy consulting and technology company specializing in Big Data Analytics for Fortune 500 clients. DMX Group was acquired by Yahoo! in 2004. In 2000 Usama left his leadership position at Microsoft to co-found and serve as Chairman and CEO Audience Science (digiMine). At Microsoft he spent 5 years leading the data mining and exploration group at Microsoft Research and also headed the data mining products group for Microsoft’s server division. From 1989 to 1996 Usama held a leadership role at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory where his work garnered him the Lew Allen Award for Excellence in Research from Caltech, as well as a U.S. Government medal from NASA. Usama has published over 100 technical articles on data mining, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and databases. He holds over 30 patents, is a Fellow of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery. He has edited two influential books on data mining and served as editor-in-chief on two key industry journals. Usama earned his Ph.D. in engineering in AI/Machine Learning from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He holds two BSE’s in Engineering, MSE Computer Engineering and M.Sc. in Mathematics. He is active in the academic community with several adjunct professor posts and is the only person to receive both the ACM’s SIGKDD Innovation Award (2007) and Service Award (2003). He serves on several private and company boards.