Data Science as a Competitive Advantage: Is There a Real Impact?

Panel Discussion
Thursday, May 7, 2015 - 4:30 pm

The interest for Data Science has increased with the wider usage of big data. Data Science is used to better understand user as well as system behaviors. But to what extent has data science actually helped improve things, and to which degree? We will discuss examples of when data science does, in fact, create real value and when it does not. How do we determine if it actually provides an advantage to us as a business? What should a data scientist consider to make sure that they actually have an impact on a business, rather than just producing interesting facts?

Data Science as a Competitive Advantage: Is There a Real Impact? - DataEDGE 2015

Jari Koister
VP of Software Engineering
Oracle

Dr. Jari Koister is VP of Software Engineering at Oracle, leading development of cloud based applications for advanced analytics and machine learning for Big Data. Previously he has been working on Big Data and Predictive analytics platforms and applications at start-up companies as well as well-known companies such as Twitter and Salesforce.com. He was the co-founder and CTO of Groupswim.com a cloud based social enterprise solution who was an early implementor of predictive techniques for enhanced functionality in social collaboration. Prior to Groupswim.com, Jari worked at fine companies such as HP Labs, Commerce One and Metrima. He also founded Qrodo, a cloud based sports cast service. While at Salesforce.com, Dr. Koister was responsible for the development of Chatter, a social enterprise application used by hundreds of thousands of companies. Dr. Koister holds a PhD in Distributed Computing from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
       

Dan McClary
Senior Principal Product Manager for Big Data and Hadoop
Oracle

Dan McClary currently serves as Senior Principal Product Manager for Big Data and Hadoop at Oracle.  Prior to joining Oracle he served as Director of Business Intelligence at Red Robot Labs in Palo Alto, CA.  He previously was a visiting scholar at Northwestern University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute where his research in Complex Systems focused on applying Hadoop to large scale graph problems.  Dan received his PhD in Computer Science from Arizona State University, where his work centered on adaptive optimization of mobile and ad hoc networks.  He holds an MS in Computer Science focused on hard real-time schedulability in distributed systems and was founder of imgSurf, a biometrics and electronic medical record company.  Dan contributes to open source projects such as Tinkerpop Blueprints and Apache Spark.