Michael Sarahan

Software Engineer at Anaconda, Inc.

Michael started as a scientist, working with image processing and instrument control for electron microscopes. Building software for these applications was so painful that Michael learned a lot and got strangely addicted to making packaging easier. Michael is currently the tech lead for the conda-build tool for creating conda packages, as well as the architect of Anaconda's next-generation automated package build system.

Wes McKinney

Software Architect & Senior Vice President at Two Sigma

Wes McKinney has been creating fast, easy-to-use data wrangling and statistical computing tools, mostly in the Python programming language, since 2007. He is best known for creating the pandas project and writing the book Python for Data Analysis. He is a PMC member of the Apache Arrow and Parquet projects in The Apache Software Foundation.

Craig Weinschenk

Research Engineer at UL Firefighter Safety Research

Craig holds a PhD and MS in Mechanical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin, where he worked with the Austin Fire Department on characterizing the impact of ventilation on room-scale fires. Craig also has conducted full-scale residential fire experiments designed to characterize the thermal environment within the structure as well as firefighter exposure. Craig is a developer of NIST's Fire Dynamics Simulator, which he has used to study fires that resulted in line-of-duty deaths to firefighters. Craig also is a primary member of the team building FireCARES.org, an online tool designed to assess community risk and fire department characteristics.

Jules S. Damji

Apache Spark Community Evangelist and Developer Advocate at Databricks

Jules S. Damji is an Apache Spark Community Evangelist and Developer Advocate at Databricks. He is a hands-on developer with over 15 years of experience, and has worked at leading companies such as Sun Microsystems, Netscape, @Home, Opsware/Loudcloud, VeriSign, ProQuest, and Hortonworks, building large-scale distributed systems. He holds a BSc and MSc in Computer Science and MA in Political Advocacy and Communication from Oregon State University, Cal State, and Johns Hopkins University, respectively.

Justin Brandenburg

Data Scientist at MapR Technologies

Justin Brandenburg is a data scientist at MapR Technologies. He has experience in a number of data analytics verticals, ranging from counter-narcotics to cyber analytics, where he has leveraged machine learning, graph theory, and agent-based modeling to pull value from data. He has an undergraduate degree in economics from Virginia Tech, a master's in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and a master's in computational social science from George Mason University.

Katrina Riehl

Director of Global Data Science at HomeAway.com

Katrina Riehl is the Director of the Global Data Science team at HomeAway.com. Over the last decade, Katrina has worked extensively in the fields of scientific computing, machine learning, data mining, and visualization. Most notably, she worked at the University of Texas at Austin, Apple, and Anaconda, Inc. (formerly Continuum Analytics). Katrina received her PhD and MS in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Dallas.

Mahmoud Hashemi

Principal Engineer at SimpleLegal

Mahmoud Hashemi is a backend engineer and architect, open source library maintainer, and Wikipedian, with ten years of experience building enterprise-grade software. He is the author of O'Reilly's Enterprise Software with Python, host of the Pyninsula Python meetup group in the San Francisco Bay Area, writer at sedimental.org, and presenter of talks on Python and architecture, delivered all around the world.

Max Humber

Data Engineer at Wealthsimple

Max is a data engineer for Wealthsimple, a Webby Award Winning Fintech company that is bringing smarter financial services to everybody, regardless of age or net worth. Prior to Wealthsimple, Max served as the first data scientist for the online lending platform Borrowell. He has spoken at ODSC, PyData, useR, and BigDataX in London, Berlin, Brussels, and Toronto.

Peter Buschbacher

Senior Manufacturing Analytics Developer at General Motors LLC

Peter Buschbacher is a Senior Manufacturing Analytics Developer at General Motors LLC. He has a background in informatics, functional programming, information systems, and business analytics. Outside of work, Peter is an avid caver, photographer, and connoisseur of beer.

Samuel Taylor

Business Intelligence Developer at Indeed

Samuel like solving data problems, distance running, and building things, and is proud of the time he spent teaching high school students to code, his pun generator, and his efforts to teach a computer sign language. 

Samuel currently works as a Business Intelligence Developer for Indeed, the world's largest job site. In the past, he’s worked for Square Root, TripAdvisor, and Logos. Samuel graduated from Baylor University, where he studied Computer Science.

Tim Horan

Consultant at Full Spectrum Analytics

Tim Horan has a decade of consumer finance experience as an analyst and leader of data scientists and analysts in unsecured lending and retail banking. Most recently, he led the development, monitoring, and maintenance of all valuation models for a top 3 US credit card issuer.

Austin West

Cyber Security Engineer at MITRE Corporation

Austin West is a Cyber Security Engineer at MITRE Corporation, a federally funded research and development center. He is a full stack Python developer with an MS degree in computer science from Naval Postgraduate School and three years’ experience in the cyber security industry.

Sripriya Sundararaman

Principal Data Scientist at State Farm

Sripriya Sundararaman is a Principal Data Scientist at State Farm, where she is working on a wide gamut of domains, techniques, and technologies. Her expertise includes graph theory, recommender systems, computer vision, deep learning, and text analytics. She has authored four patents in areas of Internet of Things, anomaly detection, and Computer Vision & Deep Learning. Prior to joining State Farm, Priya worked at blue chip companies like JCPenney and Dow Jones. Priya has an undergraduate engineering degree in Computer Science and masters in Predictive Analytics from Northwestern University.

Tassos Sarbanes

Mathematician/Data Scientist at Credit Suisse

Tassos Sarbanes is a mathematician-turned-computer-scientist and an experienced IT professional with capabilities and knowledge acquired specifically in information systems, data management, data (big, fast, small, smart) analysis, and data science in international roles. He is driven by a real love for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Effectively combining technical expertise with commercial acumen, Tassos particularly enjoys researching, exploring, and understanding specific areas of the financial industry, often preparing presentations, papers, and books on topics such as algorithmic development for mathematical and statistical problems, and optimization in numerical computing.

Hussain Sultan

Consultant at Full Spectrum Analytics

Hussain Sultan is a leader in computational Python development and data science enablement as both a software engineer and data scientist. He has worked at leading tech and financial service companies, building the infrastructure to empower analysts and data scientists to do the best work of their lives. At Full Spectrum Analytics, Hussain focuses on data science enablement for financial services. His clients include top banks as well as fintechs.

Jenny Lin

Data Scientist at Yelp

Dr. Lin is a Data Scientist at Yelp working on a wide range of data science problems, including machine learning forecasting, causal inference, and experiment analysis. She enjoys linking Yelp's rich data with external economic data, and built the prediction model underlying Yelp's Local Economic Outlook. In her previous life, she was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Oregon State University, specializing in International Trade and Finance. She has published in top peer-reviewed academic journals on the topics of causal inference and natural experiment analysis.

Michael Bernico

Data Scientist at State Farm

Michael is a Lead Data Scientist at State Farm. He also is an Adjunct Professor for the University of Illinois at Springfield, where he teaches Essentials of Data Science and Advanced Neural Networks and Deep Learning to graduate students in the computer science and analytics departments. Michael has worked on several open source software projects and remains active in that community. In his spare time, Michael likes to race bikes for Bloomington Cycle and Fitness, backpack, and take pictures.

Tim Dobbins

Data Scientist at The General

Data scientist by day, building other cool python/SQL/javascript/pi/R tools by night.

Drew Bonasera

Senior Consultant at FireEye

Drew Bonasera is a Senior Consultant at FireEye with a BS in Information Security and Forensics from Rochester Institute of Technology. He is all things Python, system administration, network security, and cat pictures, and recently has become interested in applying machine learning solutions to the security problem space.

Will Collins

Analytics Development Leader at National Grid

Will Collins is an Analytics Development Leader working at National Grid within the Electricity Transmission Owner’s Analytics team. Will focuses on applying modern data science techniques to assist engineers ensuring National Grid’s assets are maintained in a cost-effective manner, while maintaining an exceptional safety record across the system. Prior to joining National Grid, Will worked in the trading business of Centrica, one of the UK’s largest energy suppliers, optimizing the procurement of wholesale gas and electricity and developing software to assist with power station despatch amid changing market conditions.

Jacques Nadeau

CTO and Co-Founder of Dremio

Jacques Nadeau is the CTO and co-founder of Dremio. He is also the PMC Chair of the open source Apache Arrow project, spearheading the project’s technology and community. Prior to Dremio, he was the architect and engineering manager for Apache Drill and other distributed systems technologies at MapR. In addition, Jacques was CTO and co-founder of YapMap, an enterprise search startup, and held engineering leadership roles at Quigo (AOL), Offermatica (ADBE), and aQuantive (MSFT).

Daniel Rodriguez

Software Developer at Anaconda, Inc.

Daniel Rodriguez is a Data Scientist and Software Developer with over five years’ experience in areas ranging from DevOps to machine learning. He has performed data analysis and data engineering in big data environments across various industries.

Daniel holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from Universidad de los Andes Colombia, and an MS in Science in IT Management from UT Dallas. He is passionate about open source data technologies and has spoken at PyData andSpark Summit.

Mike Wendt

Manager of Analytical Systems Engineering at NVIDIA

Mike Wendt is a Manager of Analytical Systems Engineering at NVIDIA. His research work has focused on leveraging GPUs for big data analytics, data visualizations, and stream processing. Prior to joining NVIDIA, Mike led engineering work on big data technologies like Hadoop, Datastax Cassandra, Storm, Spark, and others. In addition, Mike has focused on developing new ways of visualizing data and the scalable architectures to support them. Mike holds a BS in computer engineering from the University of Maryland.

Mathew Lodge

SVP of Products & Marketing at Anaconda, Inc.

Mathew has well over 20 years’ diverse experience in cloud computing and product leadership. Prior to joining Anaconda, he served as Chief Operating Officer at Weaveworks, the container and microservices networking and management start-up; and previously as Vice President in VMware’s Cloud Services group. At VMware he was co-founder of what became its vCloud Air IaaS service.

Early in his career, Mathew built compilers and distributed systems for projects like the International Space Station, helped connect six countries to the Internet for the first time, and managed a $630m router product line at Cisco. At start-up CPlane he attempted to do SDN 10 years too early. Prior to VMware, Mathew was Senior Director at Symantec in its $1Bn+ information management group.

Keith Kraus

Senior Engineer of Applied Solutions Engineering at NVIDIA

Keith Kraus is a Senior Engineer of Applied Solutions Engineering at NVIDIA in the Washington, DC, area. At NVIDIA, Keith's focus is on building GPU-accelerated solutions around data engineering, analytics, and visualization. Prior to working for NVIDIA, Keith did extensive data engineering, systems engineering, and data visualization work in the cybersecurity domain focused on building a GPU-accelerated big data solution for advanced threat detection and cyber-hunting capabilities. Keith graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology with a BEng in computer engineering and an MEng in networked information systems.

David Patschke

Data Scientist at Dell Technologies

David is a Data Scientist in the Business Transformations organization at Dell Technologies. While at Dell, he has been the lead Data Scientist for several early-stage analytics projects ranging from long-term demand forecasting to anomalous KPI behavior detection. In his past work lives, David has been a high school math teacher, a USA High Performance volleyball coach, a software developer, a trader and a quant. He’s currently the author and maintainer of the AES Power Rankings system, a national ranking system for boys and girls junior club volleyball teams.

John Kim

President of HomeAway

As President of HomeAway, John Kim oversees strategic development and management of one of the world’s leading alternative accommodations sites. John plays a key role in guiding HomeAway's overall vision and direction, overseeing key organizations that manage over two million unique places to stay in 190 countries. Since John took leadership in 2016, HomeAway has become the second-most desirable company to work for and the third-most innovative company in Austin, ranking globally among the top 25 tech companies everyone wants to work for right now.

John has more than two decades of experience in search, recommendations, advertising, analytics, and marketing at startups, medium-sized companies, and globally known brands. Prior to joining HomeAway, John served as Expedia’s Chief Product Officer and the key leader in turning Expedia into one of the most successful travel companies in the world. Leading the company’s overall global product development efforts for hotel, air, car, and activities within Brand Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, Wotif, and AirAsiaGo, John contributed to multiple years of continual double-digit conversion improvements.

John graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and received his MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.