Presented By O’Reilly and Cloudera
Make Data Work
March 5–6, 2018: Training
March 6–8, 2018: Tutorials & Conference
San Jose, CA

Keynotes

Hear inspiring and illuminating presentations from experts and executives at Strata.

 
Amr Awadallah

Amr Awadallah
CTO, Cloudera

Amr Awadallah is the cofounder and CTO at Cloudera. Previously, Amr was an entrepreneur in residence at Accel Partners, served as vice president of product intelligence engineering at Yahoo, and ran one of the very first organizations to use... Read More.

9:30am Thursday, March 8, 2018
Automating decisions with data in the cloud
Amr Awadallah explains why the cloud requires a different approach to machine learning and analytics and what you can do about it. Full Details
Eric Colson

Eric Colson
Chief Algorithms Officer, Stitch Fix

Eric Colson is chief algorithms officer at Stitch Fix, where he leads a team of 100+ data scientists and is responsible for the multitude of algorithms that are pervasive to nearly every function of the company, from merchandise, inventory, and... Read More.

9:10am Thursday, March 8, 2018
Differentiating via data science
While companies often use data science as a supportive function, the emergence of new business models has made it possible for some companies to differentiate via data science. Eric Colson explores what it means to differentiate by data science and explains why companies must now think very differently about the role and placement of data science in the organization. Full Details
Alistair Croll

Alistair Croll
Founder, Solve For Interesting

Alistair Croll is an entrepreneur with a background in web performance, analytics, cloud computing, and business strategy. In 2001, he cofounded Coradiant (acquired by BMC in 2011) and has since helped launch Rednod, CloudOps, Bitcurrent, Year One Labs, and several... Read More.

8:45am Thursday, March 8, 2018
Thursday keynote welcome
Program chairs Ben Lorica, Doug Cutting, and Alistair Croll welcome you to the second day of keynotes. Full Details
8:45am Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Wednesday keynote welcome
Program chairs Ben Lorica, Doug Cutting, and Alistair Croll welcome you to the first day of keynotes. Full Details
Doug Cutting

Doug Cutting
Chief Architect, Cloudera

Doug Cutting is the chief architect at Cloudera and the founder of numerous successful open source projects, including Lucene, Nutch, Avro, and Hadoop. Doug joined Cloudera from Yahoo, where he was a key member of the team that built and... Read More.

8:45am Thursday, March 8, 2018
Thursday keynote welcome
Program chairs Ben Lorica, Doug Cutting, and Alistair Croll welcome you to the second day of keynotes. Full Details
8:45am Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Wednesday keynote welcome
Program chairs Ben Lorica, Doug Cutting, and Alistair Croll welcome you to the first day of keynotes. Full Details
Anoop Dawar

Anoop Dawar
Vice President, Product Management and Marketing, MapR Technologies

Anoop Dawar is vice president of product management and marketing at MapR Data Technologies. Anoop has more than a decade of experience leading product management and development teams at Cisco and Aerohive. His scientific approach to product management stems from... Read More.

9:00am Thursday, March 8, 2018
The case for a deliberate data strategy in today’s attention-deficit economy (sponsored by MapR)
We are inundated with ideas and technology news in today’s data-rich but attention-deficit economy. In this environment, competitive advantage comes not from what is abundant (i.e., data) but from what is scarce—the ability to deploy insights in real time. Anoop Dawar explains how your peers are succeeding in shrinking the insight-to-action cycle and achieving great results. Full Details

Natalie Evans Harris
Chief Operating Officer, BrightHive

Natalie Evans Harris is the founder of Harris Data Consulting and COO of BrightHive. Natalie has spent more than 16 years driving the strategic use of data to answer some of our nation’s toughest questions and driving organizational success... Read More.

10:00am Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Defining responsible data practices: A community-driven approach
Natalie Evans Harris explores the Community Principles on Ethical Data Practices (CPEDP), a community-driven code of ethics for data collection, sharing, and utilization that provides people in the data science community a standard set of easily digestible, recognizable principles for guiding their behaviors. Full Details
Li Fan

Li Fan
Senior Vice President, Engineering, Pinterest

Li Fan is the senior vice president of engineering at Pinterest, where she leads the company’s technical direction and oversees a team of 400+ engineers building a visual discovery engine. Previously, Li was the senior director of engineering at Google,... Read More.

9:05am Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Merging human and machine learning for everyday solutions
Li Fan shares insights into how Pinterest improves products based on usage and explains how the company is using AI to predict what’s in an image, what a user wants, and what they’ll want next, answering subjective questions better than machines or humans alone could achieve. Full Details
Ajey Gore

Ajey Gore
Group CTO, GO-JEK

Ajey Gore is group CTO at GO-JEK, primarily focused on payments and organization-wide technology and team strategies, where he helps the company deliver a transport, logistics, lifestyle, and payments platform of 20 products. Ajey has 18 years of... Read More.

9:45am Thursday, March 8, 2018
Inclusivity for the greater good
Ajey Gore details GO-JEK's evolution from a small bike-hailing startup to a technology-focused unicorn in the areas of transportation, lifestyle, payments, and social enterprise and explains how the company is focusing its attention beyond urban Indonesia to impact more than a million people across the country's rural areas. Full Details
Ben Lorica

Ben Lorica
Chief Data Scientist, O'Reilly

Ben Lorica is the chief data scientist at O’Reilly. Ben has applied business intelligence, data mining, machine learning, and statistical analysis in a variety of settings, including direct marketing, consumer and market research, targeted advertising, text mining, and financial engineering.... Read More.

9:30am Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Privacy in the age of machine learning
Ben Lorica shares emerging security best practices for business intelligence, machine learning, and mobile computing products and explores new tools, methods, and products that can help ease the way for companies interested in deploying secure and privacy-preserving analytics. Full Details
8:45am Thursday, March 8, 2018
Thursday keynote welcome
Program chairs Ben Lorica, Doug Cutting, and Alistair Croll welcome you to the second day of keynotes. Full Details
8:45am Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Wednesday keynote welcome
Program chairs Ben Lorica, Doug Cutting, and Alistair Croll welcome you to the first day of keynotes. Full Details
Nancy Lublin

Nancy Lublin
Founder and CEO, Crisis Text Line

Nancy Lublin does not sleep very much. Nancy is the founder and CEO of Crisis Text Line, which has processed over 50 million messages in four years and is one of the first “big data for good” orgs. Previously,... Read More.

9:40am Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Crisis Text Line data usage and insights
Nancy Lublin shares insights from Crisis Text Line. Full Details
Hilary Mason

Hilary Mason
Vice President, Research, Cloudera Fast Forward Labs

Hilary Mason is vice president of research at Cloudera Fast Forward Labs and data scientist in residence at Accel Partners. Previously, Hilary was chief scientist at Bitly. She cohosts DataGotham, a conference for New York’s homegrown data community, and cofounded... Read More.

8:50am Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Machine learning: What’s real and what’s hype
The power of machine learning is very real, but so too is the hype and confusion about when, where, and how to apply it. Hilary Mason explores practical business applications for intelligent machines and details the tools and processes required to implement machine learning successfully. Full Details
Dinesh Nirmal

Dinesh Nirmal
Vice President, Analytics Development, IBM

Dinesh Nirmal is vice president of development for data and AI at IBM. His mission is to empower every organization to transform their industry—whether it’s aerospace, finance, or healthcare—by unlocking the power of their data. Dinesh speaks and writes... Read More.

10:10am Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Operationalizing machine learning (sponsored by IBM)
Machine learning research and incubation projects are everywhere, but less common, and far more valuable, is the innovation unlocked once you bring machine learning out of research and into production. Dinesh Nirmal explains how real-world machine learning reveals assumptions embedded in business processes and in the models themselves that cause expensive and time-consuming misunderstandings. Full Details
Sangeeth Ponathil

Sangeeth Ponathil
Director, Enterprise Data Services & IT Strategy, Pizza Hut

Sangeeth is a strategic and result oriented technology leader with 20-plus years of broad leadership experience in technology strategy and enterprise solutions delivery in retail, hospitality and financial services domains. He has extensive experience in overseeing strategic programs and managed... Read More.

9:30am Thursday, March 8, 2018
Automating decisions with data in the cloud
Amr Awadallah explains why the cloud requires a different approach to machine learning and analytics and what you can do about it. Full Details
Nikita Shamgunov

Nikita Shamgunov
Cofounder and CEO, MemSQL

Nikita Shamgunov is the cofounder and CEO at MemSQL. He’s dedicated his entire career to innovation in data infrastructure. Previously, Nikita was a senior database engineer for Microsoft’s SQL Server and worked on the core data infrastructure of... Read More.

9:55am Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Building the foundation of a latency-free life (sponsored by MemSQL)
We live in a world that’s always connected. As a result, today’s intelligent applications need to react immediately to changing conditions. To achieve this, applications require a foundation that is latency free. Nikita Shamgunov shares a vision of latency-free life supported by modern data architectures. Full Details
Janelle Shane

Janelle Shane
Neural Network Wrangler, aiweirdness.com

Janelle Shane’s neural network blog, AIweirdness.com, features computer programs that try to invent human things like recipes and paint colors and Halloween costumes. AIweirdness.com has been covered in the Guardian, the Atlantic, NBC News, and Slate and was... Read More.

8:50am Thursday, March 8, 2018
Sprouted clams and stanky bean: When machine learning makes mistakes
At AIweirdness.com Janelle Shane posts the results of neural network experiments gone delightfully wrong. But machine learning mistakes can also be very embarrassing or even dangerous. Using silly datasets as examples, Janelle talks about some ways that algorithms fail. Full Details
Alex Smola

Alex Smola
Director, Machine Learning, Amazon

Alex Smola is director of machine learning at Amazon.

10:15am Wednesday, March 7, 2018
Data science in the cloud
In this talk Alex will discuss lessons learned from AWS SageMaker, an integrated framework for handling all stages of analysis. AWS uses open source components such as Jupyter, Docker containers, Python and well established deep learning frameworks such as Apache MxNet and TensorFlow for an easy to learn workflow. Full Details
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
New York Times, New York Times

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz uses data from the internet (particularly Google searches) to get new insights into the human psyche, measuring racism, self-induced abortion, depression, child abuse, hateful mobs, the science of humor, sexual preference, anxiety, son preference, and sexual insecurity, among... Read More.

10:05am Thursday, March 8, 2018
Lessons in Google Search data
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz explains how to use Google searches to uncover behaviors or attitudes that may be hidden from traditional surveys, such as racism, sexuality, child abuse, and abortion. Full Details
Tobias Ternstrom

Tobias Ternstrom
Product Manager, Microsoft

Tobias Ternstrom is the product management leader for open source databases and database migrations in Microsoft Azure, where he is responsible for supporting Microsoft’s customers betting on open source databases for their business. His team builds Azure database services for... Read More.

9:20am Wednesday, March 7, 2018
To a hammer, everything is a nail: Choosing the right tool for your business problems (sponsored by Microsoft)
The emergence of the cloud combined with open source software ushered in an explosive use of a broad range of technologies. Tobias Ternstrom explains why you should step back and attempt to objectively evaluate the problem you are trying to solve before choosing the tool to fix it. Full Details
William Vambenepe

William Vambenepe
Group Product Manager, Google

William Vambenepe leads the product management team responsible for big data services on Google Cloud Platform.

9:40am Thursday, March 8, 2018
What separates the clouds? (sponsored by Google Cloud)
William Vambenepe explains how a pivot toward machine learning and artificial intelligence has created clearer separation among clouds than ever before. William walks you through an interesting use case of machine learning in action and discusses the central role AI will play in big data analysis moving forward. Full Details