Session 5 of the Applied Data Science Invited Talks Track

Session 5 of the Applied Data Science Invited Talks Track

Wednesday 10 AM – August 16, 2016 – Yosemite Room – Hilton San Francisco

ByRajesh Parekh (@rgparekh), Usama Fayyad (@usamaf) & Evangelos Simoudis  (@esimoudis)

Applied Data Science – Invited Talks Track Co-Chairs, KDD-2016

The introductory article in this blog series can be found here.

Would you like to learn what role time and timing plays in world’s best recommendation engines? Do you know that enterprises can save 100’s of millions of dollars by better harnessing enterprise data?
Wouldn’t it be great if digital identity can be unified across multiple devices in a privacy-safe and scalable manner?

The answers to these and more will be shared at the Applied Data Science invited talks track at 10:00 AM on Wednesday 8/17/2016 to learn more.


Wow! It is hard to believe that we are at the end of an exciting invited talks program. Conference attendees have actively sought out the invited talks. The over-flowing conference room with standing room only and the long discussions with the invited speakers following the talks are a testament of the interest this track has generated. We are wrapping up the final session of the Applied Data Science invited talks with 3 fascinating talks to be given by Caitlin Smallwood of Netflix, Andy Palmer of Tamr, and Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan & Randell Cotta of Drawbridge.

Caitlin Smallwood is the Vice President of Science and Algorithms at Netflix, where she and her team drive predictive decision models, algorithm / machine learning research, and experimentation science for all parts of the Netflix business. Caitlin is particularly passionate about personalization and other mechanisms of providing value to people through data. Caitlin’s talk will explore how time – and timing – impact Netflix’s data science applications. Netflix enables stories from around the world to be discovered, enjoyed, and shared globally. Success in this space means finding and creating the right movies and TV shows, connecting them with the cultures and people who will enjoy them, and delivering a high-quality video streaming experience. The specific manner in which time is handled can impact results dramatically. Caitlin’s talk will share how Netflix incorporates time in algorithm training, feature engineering, A/B test execution, and measurement of member behaviors.

Andy Palmer (@andyhpalmer) is the CEO and Co-founder of Tamr. Andy is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor who has helped start, fund or found 50+ innovative companies in technology, health care and the life sciences, including pioneering big data analytics company Vertica Systems (acquired by HP). He also founded Koa Labs, a shared start-up space for entrepreneurs in Cambridge’s Harvard Square; and is a Research Affiliate at MIT CSAIL and co-presenter of the MIT edX course “Startup Success: How to Launch a Technology Company in 6 Steps.” In his talk, Andy exposes the dirty secret of messy, siloed, enterprise data! Pulling from first hand experience, Palmer shares how Fortune 500 companies are saving $100s of millions by automatically unifying and preparing enterprise data at scale—and empowering enterprise data and IT professionals to become the “Googlers” of their enterprise.

Rounding off our stellar list of speakers are Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan and Randell Cotta of DrawbridgeKamakshiis the founder and CEO of Drawbridge, the leading technology company that is fundamentally changing the way in which brands and enterprises connect with people. Under Kamakshi’s leadership, Drawbridge has built the first technology-aided solution that addresses a problem central to all digital media: consumer-trusted cross-device identity. Randell Cotta is a Senior Data Scientist at Drawbridge, where he has spent the last three years focused on designing the intelligence behind their digital identity solution as well as the learning systems that leverage digital identity for their partners and underlying consumers. Kamakshi and Randell’s talk will focus on Democratizing Consumer Identity. With today’s massive global adoption of personal computers, smartphones, tablets, and the emerging class of devices, we live in a time of unprecedented device proliferation. This gives rise to very fundamental challenges around the fragmentation of consumer identity. The talk addresses how machine learning and data science best-practices can solve for this identity capability, and how it can be done in a privacy-safe and data-safe manner, with high precision and at massive scale.

Be sure to catch these talks tomorrow, August 17 from 10 AM – 12 noon in the Yosemite conference room at the Hilton.

Rajesh, Usama and Evangelos – co–chairs of Invited Talks Track

Usama Fayyad, President & CEO, Open Insights  (formerly Barclays CDO)
Rajesh Parekh, Analytics Director, Facebook
Evangelos Simoudis, Founder & Managing Director, Synapse Partners

Read the next Blog in the series by clickingHERE
Read the previous Blog in this series by clicking HERE

Come to our Interactive Panels Program as part of the Applied Data Science Track on Tuesday Afternoon, August 16, 2016:
Read about the Invited Panel: The Myths & Reality of BigData Tools
Read about the Invited Panel: BigData Needs Big Dreamers: Lessons from BigData Investors

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