Speakers
Speakers San Francisco 2009:
Dean Abbott, President, Abbott Analytics
Dean Abbott is President of Abbott Analytics in San Diego, California. Mr. Abbott has over 20 years of experience applying advanced data mining, data preparation, and data visualization methods in real-world data intensive problems, including tax risk and collections, fraud detection, customer analytics (response, cross-sell, segmentation models), survey analysis, planned giving, and predictive toxicology. In addition, he has developed and evaluated algorithms for use in commercial data mining products.Mr. Abbott is a seasoned instructor, having taught a wide range of data mining, tutorials and seminars for a decade to audiences of up to 400, including DAMA, KDD, AAAI, IEEE conferences as well as users conferences for SPSS, Insightful Corp., and Salford Systems, having also served twice on the industrial program committee for KDD conferences. He is the instructor of well-regarded data mining courses, explaining concepts in language readily understood by a wide range of audiences, including analytics novices, data analysts, statisticians, and business professionals. Mr. Abbott also has taught applied courses for major software vendors, including Clementine (SPSS), Affinium Model (Unica Corporation), Model 1 (Group1 Software), and hands-on courses using S-Plus and Insightful Miner (Insightful Corporation), and CART (Salford Systems).
See Dean speaking at this session:
Case Study: National Rifle AssociationHow to Improve Customer Acquisition Models with Ensembles
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Cross-Industry Challenges and Solutions in Predictive Analytics
Natasha Balac, Ph.D., Data Applications Group Manager, San Diego Supercomputer Center
Dr. Balac is responsible for the leadership and management of the Data Applications and Services group at SDSC. This group supports DataCentral, the first national program of its kind to host and make available significant research and community data collections and databases. Natasha received her Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Middle Tennessee State University as well as her Master's and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University.See Natasha speaking at this session:
Case Study: San Diego Supercomputer CenterHigh Performance Scoring of Healthcare Data
Sugato Basu, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist, Google
His areas of research expertise include machine learning, data mining, predictive modeling and optimization, with special emphasis on scalable algorithm design for text and social network analysis. He did his Ph.D. in machine learning from UT Austin, and worked at SRI International on the CALO project before joining Google. He has written multiple papers, book chapters, and encyclopedia articles on clustering, semi-supervised learning, record linkage, social search / routing, rule mining, and optimization, and has won best paper awards at the KDD, ICML and SDM conferences. He continues to serve on multiple conference / journal committees and NSF panels on machine learning and data mining.
See Sugato speaking at this session:
Predicting the Quality of Advertisements on AdWordsThomas Rose-Bolden, Senior Marketing Manager, TaxBrain
Thomas Rose-Bolden is director of marketing for TaxBrain, where he leads strategic development and implementation of all multi-channel performance marketing and advertising programs. Mr. Rose-Bolden is an award-winning advertising professional and graphic design instructor with 16 years experience working with such companies as Time Warner, NBC/Universal, Yahoo!, and Google.See Thomas speaking at this session:
Case Study: TaxBrainCompleting the Visitor Targeting Cycle: Predictive Behavioral Targeting and Audience Maps
Traci Chu, Director CRM, Bella Pictures
Traci has a background in multichannel marketing including responsibility for: lead generation, circulation planning, go to market strategy and forecasting. She has marketed for software, retail and consumer services companies. She has 14 years of Direct Marketing experience and has collaborated with statistical talent most of her career at companies like Williams-Sonoma, The Learning Company & Bella Pictures.
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Scoring Leads from Salesforce.com DataVijay Desai, Ph.D., Principal Scientist, SAS
Dr. Vijay Desai currently has worked at SAS as a Principal Scientist in the Financial Services market over the last six years. Focus areas include network intrusion detection system, a bio-surveillance project to detect bio-terrorist attacks, and building a system to identify tax under-filers. Prior to that he was with HNC Software / Fair Isaac as Director of Modeling and a Principal Scientist where he was responsible for ProfitMax, a card holder profitability prediction system which predicts credit and attrition risk, in additions to revenue and profit for credit card accounts. Desai was also an Assistant Professor at University of Virginia where he taught Statistics, Database Management, Operations Management, and Decision Support Systems for 6 years. In addition he has published numerous papers in journals such as Annals of Operations Research, European Journal of Operational Research, and Decision Science. Ph.D. in Decision Sciences (Indiana University, Bloomington) M.M.S. in Finance (Bombay University), B. Tech. in Chemical Engineering (I.I.T. Bombay).See Vijay speaking at this session:
Cross-Industry Challenges and Solutions in Predictive AnalyticsJohn F. Elder, Ph.D., CEO and Founder, Elder Research, Inc.
Dr. John F. Elder heads a data mining consulting team with offices in Charlottesville, Virginia and Washington DC. Founded in 1995, Elder Research, Inc. focuses on scientific and commercial applications of pattern discovery and optimization, including stock selection, image recognition, text mining, biometrics, drug efficacy, credit scoring, cross-selling, investment timing, and fraud detection.John obtained a BS and MEE in Electrical Engineering from Rice University, and a PhD in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia, where he's an adjunct professor, teaching Optimization or Data Mining. Prior to 13 years leading ERI, he spent 5 years in aerospace defense consulting, 4 heading research at an investment management firm, and 2 in Rice's Computational & Applied Mathematics department.
Dr. Elder has authored innovative data mining tools, is active on Statistics, Engineering, and Finance conferences and boards, is a frequent keynote conference speaker, and is General Chair of the 2009 Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining conference in Paris. John's courses on data analysis techniques – taught at dozens of universities, companies, and government labs – are noted for their clarity and effectiveness. Dr. Elder was honored to serve for 5 years on a panel appointed by the President to guide technology for National Security. His book on Practical Data Mining, with Bob Nisbet and Gary Minor, will appear in May 2009.
See John speaking at this session:
Multiple Case StudiesThe High ROI of Data Mining for Innovative Organizations
Usama Fayyad, Ph.D., CEO, Open Insights
Dr. Usama Fayyad was until recently Yahoo!'s Chief Data Officer and Executive Vice President of Research & Strategic Data Solutions where he was responsible for Yahoo!'s global data strategy, architecting Yahoo!'s data policies and systems, prioritizing data investments, and managing the Company's data analytics and data processing infrastructure. Fayyad also founded and oversaw the Yahoo! Research organization with offices around the world. Yahoo! Research is building the premier scientific research organization to develop the new sciences of the Internet, on-line marketing, and innovative interactive applications.Prior to joining Yahoo!, Fayyad co-founded and led the DMX Group, a data mining and data strategy consulting and technology company that was acquired by Yahoo! in 2004. In early 2000, he co-founded and served as CEO of Revenue Science, Inc.(digiMine, Inc.), a data analysis and data mining company that built, operated and hosted data warehouses and analytics for some of the world's largest enterprises in online publishing, retail, manufacturing, telecommunications and financial services. The company today specializes in Behavioral Targeting and advertising networks. Fayyad's professional experience also includes five years spent leading the data mining and exploration group at Microsoft Research and building the data mining products for Microsoft's server division. From 1989 to 1996 Fayyad held a leadership role at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), where his work in the analysis and exploration of scientific databases gathered from observatories, remote-sensing platforms and spacecraft garnered him the top research excellence award that Caltech awards to JPL scientists, as well as a U.S. Government medal from NASA.
Fayyad earned his Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (1991), and also holds BSE's in both electrical and computer engineering (1984); MSE in computer science and engineering (1986); and M.Sc. in mathematics (1989). He has published over 100 technical articles in the fields of data mining and Artificial Intelligence, is a Fellow of the AAAI and a Fellow of the ACM, has edited two influential books on the data mining and launched and served as editor-in-chief of both the primary scientific journal in the field of data mining and the primary newsletter in the technical community published by the ACM: SIGKDD Explorations.
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Keynote: New Challenges in Predictive Analytics: Social Networking, Direct-Response Marketing, and Understanding Customer BehaviorVincent Granville, Chief Scientist, Click Forensics
Vincent Granville has successfully solved problems for 15 years in data mining, text mining, predictive modeling, business intelligence, technical analysis, keyword and web analytics. Vincent is widely recognized as the leading expert in click scoring and click fraud detection. Over the last ten years, he has worked in real-time credit card fraud detection with Visa, advertising analytics with CNET, A/B testing with LowerMyBills, online user experience with Wells Fargo, query intelligence with InfoSpace, click fraud detection with major search engines and large advertising clients.Vincent was formerly Chief Science Officer at Authenticlick. In the last few years, he successfully launched DataShaping, AnalyticBridge, AnalyticBrain, AnalyticTalent, Frenchlane and many other websites. Vincent is a former post-doctorate of Cambridge University and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was among the finalists at the Wharton School Business Plan Competition and at the Belgian Mathematical Olympiads. He is currently Chief Scientist at Click Forensics and managing the AnalyticBridge network.
See Vincent speaking at this session:
Case Study: Click ForensicsPredictive Scores to Optimize Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
Khosrow Hassibi, Ph.D., Senior Technical Director, KXEN
Khosrow Hassibi, Ph.D., is a senior Technical Director at KXEN, a data mining software vendor headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Dr Hassibi has a Ph.D. in EECS from Case Western Reserve University with special concentration in the areas of Intelligent Systems and Machine Learning. Dr Hassibi is also a graduate of UCLA Anderson Executive Program in Management. His expertise is based on seventeen years of design, development, consulting, and management in applying advanced data mining technologies to real-world applications that benefit from behavioral scoring. Dr Hassibi spent several years at HNC Software (now Fair Isaac) where he was last responsible for the core analytic technology group worldwide (R&D) focused on fraud solution products like credit card fraud detection. He is known in the financial industry due to his contributions to payment card fraud detection technology. Dr Hassibi holds two patents and has contributed to several copy-righted commercial software products.See Khosrow speaking at this session:
Case Study: Wells Fargo Internet Services GroupNew Challenges for Developing Predictive Analytics Solutions
Todd Holloway, Ingenuity Systems
Todd Holloway is a PhD Candidate in computer science at Indiana University. Currently on leave, he works at Ingenuity Systems creating novel visualizations of (systems biology) network datasets. The aim of such visualizations is to speedup the drug discovery process. His research interests are structural data mining, network visualization, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. He maintains a blog on these topics at abeautifulwww.comSee Todd speaking at this session:
Visualization and the Netflix PrizeArthur Hughes, Senior Strategist, e-Dialog.com
Arthur Middleton Hughes serves e-Dialog as their Senior Strategist. In this role he advises e-Dialog staff and e-Dialog clients on profitable strategies for using electronic communications in their marketing programs. Arthur is one of the pioneers in the database marketing field. He has been designing and maintaining marketing databases for Fortune 500 companies and others for the past twenty years. His database experience includes wired and wireless telephone companies, insurance, banks, catalogers,retailers, pharmaceuticals, package goods, software and computer manufacturers, resorts, hotels, automobiles, and non-profit fund-raisers.A graduate of Princeton University with a Masters in Public Affairs, Arthur taught economics at the University of Maryland for 32 years. When it comes to database marketing, he wrote the book! He is the author of The Complete Database Marketer. 2nd Ed. (McGraw Hill 1996), Strategic Database Marketing 3rd.Ed. (McGraw Hill 2006) and The Customer Loyalty Solution (McGraw Hill 2003).
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Case StudyPredictive Modeling for Email Marketing
David Katz, Founder & President, David Katz Consulting
David Katz has been in the forefront of applying statistical models and database technology to marketing problems since 1980. He holds a Master's Degree in Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. He is one of the founders of Abacus Direct Marketing and was previously was previously the Director of Database Development for Williams-Sonoma.He is the founder and President of David Katz Consulting, specializing in sophisticated statistical services for a variety of applications, with a special focus on the Direct Marketing Industry. David Katz has an extensive background that includes experience in all aspects of direct marketing from data mining, to strategy, to test design and implementation. In addition, he consults on a variety of data mining and statistical applications from public health to collections analysis. He has partnered with consulting firms such as Ernst and Young and Prediction Impact.
See David moderating Track 1 on February 18th
Gary Katz, Founder & CEO, Marketing Operations Partners
Gary Katz, Founder and CEO of Marketing Operations Partners, is a visionary and thought leader in the emerging Marketing Operations field. He is a veteran with more than twenty years of marketing and change management experience in the technology industry in corporate, agency and entrepreneurial positions, where he directed corporate marketing, communications, public relations, lead generation and qualification, investor relations, and employee communications programs. In addition to founding Marketing Operations Partners' and its sister company, CommPros Group in 2005, he previously formed a communications consultancy and public relations firm. Gary holds a master's degree in organization development from the University of San Francisco and a bachelor’s degree in public relations from San Jose State University. He has served as a track chair for the Henry Stewart Marketing Operations Symposium during the past four years and is a noted author, speaker and evangelist on the topic of Marketing Operations. He recently taught the first known US class on Marketing Operations at UCSC Extension in Sunnyvale.
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Marketing Operations: The Engine Behind Predictive AnalyticsKathy Konkel, Manager, Product Marketing, SPSS Inc.
Kathy has 20 years of experience in the software industry with a variety of roles in IT, software development and product management/product marketing. She currently manages the Deployment Family of products at SPSS Inc., with a focus on providing solutions that link analytics to real business impact.See Kathy speaking at this session:
Case Study: MetLife Auto & Home(r)Identifying Fraud with Predictive Analytics
Joshua Koran, VP, Targeting and Optimization, ValueClick
Joshua Koran is one of the online advertising industry's most knowledgeable marketing analytics and behavioral targeting experts. As vice president, targeting and optimization for ValueClick, Inc., Mr. Koran is responsible for overseeing product development related to all of the company's behavioral targeting and optimization technologies. Before joining ValueClick in 2007, Mr. Koran was director of product management and engineering at Yahoo!, where he contributed to developing the company's outbound e-mail platform, its campaign analytics systems and behavioral targeting technologies. Prior to Yahoo!, Mr. Koran was director of product management at YesMail, where he was in charge of developing its core retention e-mail platform and enhancing the company's reporting, real-time business analytics and dynamic content personalization technologies. Mr. Koran has held director-level positions at other online marketing analytics firms, including Angara, where he helped pioneer anonymous real-time personalization, technologies and Personify, where he led development of the company's core segmentation platform.See Joshua speaking at this session:
Case Study: TaxBrainCompleting the Visitor Targeting Cycle: Predictive Behavioral Targeting and Audience Maps
Matt Kramer, Global Consulting and Analytics Group, Acxiom
Matt very recently came from ChoicePoint Precision Marketing (CPPM) where he was an Assistant Vice President of Analytics & Consulting and was responsible for modeling and analytics direction and development across all of CPPM's managed database clients. During his 6+ year tenure with CPPM, Matt was responsible for analytics consultation and strategic sales support across all clients. Previous to joining CPPM, he was Director of Client Services with Ronald J. Krumm & Associates, LLC, where he managed and developed client relationships with Wachovia's and First Union's bankcard marketing and retail bank insurance services divisions.His primary responsibilities included econometric time series modeling, sales and support for risk, attrition, retention, cash/check usage, profitability, pricing, cross sell, and insurance response. Matt has extensive experience in database marketing (16 years) and Analytics (20 years). Matt holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from North Central College in Naperville, Illinois.
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Case Study: Wells Fargo Card ServicesCustomer Marketing – Predictive Modeling & Today's Growing Data Challenges
Alex Kriney, Distinguished Marketing Director, Lifecycle Marketing, Sun Microsystems
Since 1992 Alex has been building global customer relationship management and marketing automation programs and technologies for companies such as HP, VMware, HarperCollins Publishers, Reed Elsevier, Staples, Acxiom Digital and Time Warner as well as Sun. Alex is an alumnus of Columbia University's Computer Technology and Applications – Software Engineering program and holds a B.A. in Economics from Kenyon College in Ohio.
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Case Study: Sun MicrosystemsMarrying Prediction and Segmentation to Drive Sales Leads
Kim Larsen, Director Advanced Analytics, Charles Schwab & Co.
Kim Larsen is a Director in the Advanced Analytics group at Charles Schwab & Co., in San Francisco. The Advanced Analytics team works directly with partners in marketing, finance, and product management to solve business problems through statistical analysis and optimize the impact of marketing and other business levers. He has more than eight years of experience in data mining and statistical modeling in the financial services industry.Throughout his professional career he has worked on a wide array of data mining problems, including customer segmentation, forecasting, price optimization, and predictive modeling for various applications. Kim holds a BS in mathematics and economics and an MS in statistics.
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Case Study: Charles Schwab & CoMaximize Marketing Impact with Net Lift Models
Anna Lu, Senior Research Manager, e-Dialog.com
Anna works on helping e-Dialog's client base refine and optimize their marketing approaches through a combination of sequential-data analytics and strategic interactive marketing, primarily focusing on email. Through her 12 years of experience with both on- and off-line data, she has continually pushed for the effective use of information for advanced database marketing, and her expertise has allowed e-Dialog to utilize more advanced and sophisticated statistical techniques to enhance email marketing performance in ways unmatched by other email and database marketing companies.See Anna speaking at this session:
Case StudyPredictive Modeling for Email Marketing
John MacGregor, Senior Director, Product Management, SAP
John has over 30 years of experience in the Business Intelligence industry and combines both a technical and business background, from University Lecturer in Statistics and Operations Research, to Managing Director of several BI companies, for example Regional Director, Crystal Decisions, Australia & NZ; Managing Director, Gentia Software, UK and of Australia & NZ;started and ran his own BI company in Australia, also covering NZ & S.E Asia for 12+ years; Managing Director, Pilot Software, Australia & NZ. John has over a dozen Patents in BI in application, with one recently granted for OLAP Data Mining. John is responsible for predictive analysis across the Business Objects product suite.
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Delivering Intelligence in Busines Intelligence – The I in BIJohn McConnell, Director, Analytical People
John has been involved in business/research analytics and technology since 1986. Spanning many dimensions in services and management roles in SPSS from 1989 to 2000 and in several new ventures since 2000. Most typically configuring and applying analytical methodologies to a variety of client-specific business problems. John co-founded Applied Insights – specialising in Advanced Digital Analytics – with Neil Mason in 2004. That business was acquired by Foviance in November 2008 and John started Analytical People.See John speaking at this session:
Case Study: Reed ElsevierProfitably increasing retention – and convincing the business that you are
David McMichael, Ph.D., Assistant Vice President, MetLife Auto & Home
David McMichael is Assistant Vice President at MetLife Auto & Home. He is responsible for the Quantitative Research & Modeling team, a unit of the Actuarial Department. The QRM team searches for opportunities where Analytics (data mining and statistical modeling) can be combined with business knowledge to help drive better decision making. The QRM team has worked on projects for Pricing, Underwriting, Claims, and Marketing.Prior to joining MetLife in 2003, David worked in the Research & Development unit at Allstate Insurance Company. David began his professional career in academics, serving for 12 years on the faculty of the Mathematics Department at Florida State University. David holds a B.S. degree in Mathematics from the University of Kentucky, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin. David is a Fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society, and a member of the American Academy of Actuaries.
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Case Study: MetLife Auto & Home(r)Identifying Fraud with Predictive Analytics
Anne H. Milley, Senior Director, Technology Product Marketing, SAS
As senior director of SAS' technology product marketing in worldwide marketing, Anne Milley oversees the product marketing of SAS technologies. Her ties to SAS began with her thesis on bank failure prediction models and the term structure of interest rates. She completed this at The Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas and became a manager in the credit group. She continued her use of SAS at 7-Eleven, Inc. as a senior business consultant performing sales analysis and designing and conducting tests to aid in strategic decision-making, e.g., price sensitivity studies, advertising and promotion analysis.Milley has authored various papers, articles and an award-winning report for the 1999 KDD Contest: http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/users/elkan/kdresults.html. She co-chaired the SAS Data Mining Technology Conferences, M2001 and M2002 as well as SAS' inaugural forecasting conference, F2006. She has served on web mining committees for KDD and SIAM and on the Scientific Advisory Committee for Data Mining 2002. Milley has a Master of Arts and Bachelor of Arts in economics from Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, did post-graduate work at Aachen Technical University (Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen) and is proficient in German.
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Analytics: The Art and Science of BetterJim Porzak, Senior Director of Marketing Analytics, The Generations Network
Jim recently joined The Generations Network (Ancestry.com) from Responsys, Inc. where he did this work for Sun Microsystems. At Responsys and Loyalty Matrix, which was acquired by Responsys, Jim specialized in understand customer behavior applying statistical modeling, segmentation, and machine learning methods to detailed customer transactions for clients like 24 Hour Fitness, Philosophy, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Sun Times, Fleetwood, iDine, Master Foods (M&Ms), and Apple (.MAC).Jim has been doing marketing, business intelligence, and analytics for the last twenty years. He frequently presents at seminars both here and in Europe. Jim is particularly active promoting the use of R, the open source platform, for doing customer and marketing analytics.
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Case Study: Sun MicrosystemsMarrying Prediction and Segmentation to Drive Sales Leads
Anand Rajaraman, Co-Founder, Kosmix
Anand Rajaraman is a co-founder of Kosmix, an internet startup focused on organizing the wisdom of the web. He is also a Founding Partner of Cambrian Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm, and a Consulting Assistant professor at the Computer Science Department at Stanford University.Previously, Anand was Director of Technology at Amazon.com, where he was responsible for technology strategy and helped launch the transformation of Amazon.com from a retailer into a retail platform. He came to Amazon.com in 1998 through the $250 Million acquisition of Junglee, an Internet pioneer that he co-founded in 1996. He obtained his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, where he won the President of India Gold Medal for graduating at the top of his class, and his MS and PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Anand has been featured in articles in Business Week, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other leading national publications. On his Blog Datawocky, he discusses the application of data mining techniques to search, social media, and advertising.
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It's the Data, Stupid!Patrick Surry, Ph.D., Vice President of Technology, Portrait Software
Mr. Surry is an expert on the Uplift method and the Vice President of Technology for Portrait Software. Patrick holds a Ph.D. in mathematics and statistics from the University of Edinburgh where he studied optimization based on evolutionary algorithms, following an HBSc in continuum mechanics from the University of Western Ontario.See Patrick speaking at this session:
Case Study: TelenorApplying Next Generation Uplift Modeling to Optimize Customer Retention Programs
James Taylor, CEO, Decision Management Solutions
James Taylor is CEO of Decision Management Solutions and one of the leading experts in decision management. James works with clients to develop effective technology solutions to improve business performance. James was previously a Vice President at Fair Isaac Corporation where he developed and refined the concept of enterprise decision management or EDM. The best known proponent of the approach, James is a passionate advocate of decision management. James has 20 years experience in all aspects of the design, development, marketing and use of advanced technology including CASE tools, project planning and methodology tools as well as platform development in PeopleSoft's R&D team and consulting with Ernst and Young. He develops approaches, tools and platforms that others can use to build more effective information systems. He is an experienced speaker and author, with his columns and articles appearing regularly in industry magazines.
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From Analytics to Competing on Decisionsand moderating Track 2 on February 19th
Andreas Töscher, Research & Technical Development, Commendo Research and Consulting, GmbH
Andreas Töscher is one of two founding members of the top Netflix Prize team, "BigChaos," which currently holds first place, and cofounder of Commendo Research and Consulting, GmbH, a small, high-profile consulting firm based in Austria that develops and deploys product recommendation systems. Andreas is also working towards graduate degrees in machine learning at the Technical University Graz, and in mathematics at the University of Graz (Karl-Franzens-Universität). His graduate research focuses on scaling recommendation systems.
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Case Study: Netflix Prize (leading competitor)Advanced Approaches for Recommender Systems and the Netflix Prize
Jay Venkateswaran, Senior VP, Research & Analytics, WNS Global Services
Based in New York, Jay leads the WNS Research and Analytics practice in North America. He is responsible for crafting and implementing WNS's vision and leading the sales efforts in the Research and Analytics space.Jay has spent over five years at WNS in a variety of operational and corporate roles, including program and account management, corporate strategy, mergers and acquisitions and corporate finance. Prior to WNS, Jay spent over six years as a management consultant working for A.T. Kearney in India and South East Asia, where his focus was on corporate strategy, market entry and operations improvement. Jay has a Masters in Business Administration.
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Leveraging Global Analytical Resources in a Challenging Economic Environment.Richard G. Vlasimsky, Co-Founder & Vice-President, Valen Technologies
Mr. Vlasimsky is a cofounder of Valen Technologies, a turnkey predictive analytic solution provider that specializes in property casualty insurance. Mr. Vlasimsky has developed pricing models for commercial lines of business (BOP, GL, Property, Auto, and Work Comp), premium audit models, retention models for transportation companies, and loss prevention models. Mr. Vlasimsky began his career at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), where he worked on a number of successful initiatives, notably: a global deployment of enterprise resource planning and demand planning system for Texas Instruments, a technology transfer and channel development project with an enterprise application integration startup (SeeBeyond Technologies), and the development of a constraint-based ad-targeting system for Turner Broadcasting (now Time Warner).After Andersen, Mr. Vlasimsky joined Silicon Valley startup, Market Touch, and served as product manager for their content personalization line of products. Mr. Vlasimsky became involved with the computational learning groups at Berkeley and Stanford where he explored new approaches to statistical learning – including Support Vector Machines, Fuzzy Logic, Particle Swarm Optimization, Genetic Algorithms, and Neural Networks. These early explorations ultimately led to the co-founding of Valen Technologies.
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Case Study: Pinnacol AssuranceA Day in the Life: Predictive Analytics in the Insurance Industry
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Cross-Industry Challenges and Solutions in Predictive Analytics
John Wallace, Principal Consultant & Founder, Business Researchers
John Wallace is a principal consultant and founder of Business Researchers. He has a track record at applying data mining techniques to business problems. His work has included designing applications to analyze customer profitability, customer loyalty, product profitability and product quality. He has worked as an analytical consultant at SAS Institute as well as a Business Intelligence analyst at UUNET.His consulting experience has included working for clients in the automotive, financial services, ISP, grocery, wireless, retail, PC/server and consumer software industries. He has successfully managed application development teams, created system architecture, developed new analytical methodologies and estimated complex models. He has leveraged techniques including text mining, response modeling, segmentation and survival data mining. He holds an MBA in Decision Science from the George Washington University.
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Scoring Leads from Salesforce.com DataAndreas S. Weigend, Ph.D., people & data, and former Chief Scientist, Amazon.com
Andreas S. Weigend, Ph.D. was Chief Scientist at Amazon.com, where he specialized in understanding how people behave online, helping Amazon build its customer-centric, measurement-focused culture. He now works as an independent consultant with firms including Alibaba, Lufthansa, MySpace, and Nokia, helping some of the most brilliant executives around the world leverage user data to produce innovative products and business models. He also teaches at Stanford and UC Berkeley, and is often invited to speak at international events.
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The Unrealized Predictive Power of DataMichael Zeller, Ph.D., CEO, Zementis
Dr. Zeller manages the strategic direction of Zementis, a software company focused on predictive analytics and advanced decisioning technology. His mission is to combine science and software to create superior business and industrial solutions that leverage predictive models and rules in real-time.Dr. Zeller received a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Frankfurt (Germany), with emphasis in the development of neural networks, robotics, and human-computer intelligent interaction. He received a visiting scholarship from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was the recipient of a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California.
See Michael speaking at this session:
Case Study: San Diego Supercomputer CenterHigh Performance Scoring of Healthcare Data
Jun Zhong, VP Targeting and Analytics, Card Services Customer Marketing, Wells Fargo
Jun Zhong has been with Wells Fargo for over 4 years in the area of marketing analytics and currently managing statistical modeling, segmentation, and marketing analytics efforts to optimize credit card acquisition, activation, and retention strategies.Jun Zhong has more than 12 years of experience in statistical analysis and modeling in both marketing and risk management. Prior to Wells Fargo, Jun spent a number of years at Providian Financial as the Manager of Acquisition Credit Risk Modeling responsible for underwriting strategies, line assignment and prediction of fraud.
Jun Zhong earned a bachelor's degree from Jinan University and a Ph.D. from The Pennsylvania State University.
See Jun speaking at this session:
Case Study: Wells Fargo Card ServicesCustomer Marketing – Predictive Modeling & Today's Growing Data Challenges
