Dean Abbott is President of Abbott Analytics, Inc. in San Diego, California. Mr. Abbott is an internationally recognized data mining and predictive analytics expert with over two decades experience applying advanced data mining algorithms, data preparation techniques, and data visualization methods to real-world problems, including fraud detection, risk modeling, text mining, personality assessment, response modeling, survey analysis, planned giving, and predictive toxicology. Mr. Abbott is also Chief Scientist of SmarterRemarketer, a startup company focusing on behaviorally- and data-driven marketing attribution and web analytics.

Mr. Abbott is a highly-regarded and popular speaker at Predictive Analytics and Data Mining conferences. He has served on the program committee for the KDD Industrial Track and Data Mining Case Studies workshop and is on the Advisory Boards for the UC/Irvine Predictive Analytics Certificate and the UCSD Data Mining Certificate programs. Mr. Abbott has taught applied data mining and text mining courses using IBM SPSS Modeler, SAS Enterprise Miner, Statsoft Statistica, Tibco Spotfire Miner, IBM Affinium Model, Megaputer Polyanalyst, Salford Systems CART, KNIME, and RapidMiner.

Gary received his BA from Pomona College and his MA and PhD from Stanford. After a stint as a college professor, he joined a consulting firm in management control and accounting systems. He later joined a regional and in 1986 started his own company providing group benefit plans. After selling his TPA, he moved to The Travelers to develop managed care services for workers' compensation.

Gary went to Zenith National in 1994 to design the SinglePoint program. He joined Prudential two years later to develop Prudential's managed care services for workers' compensation and later moved to Prudential Group Insurance to develop an Integrated Disability Management product. He retired from Prudential and joined Broadspire in 2007 in Data Analytics.

Gary has published on disability, workers' compensation, and benefit integration. In addition, Gary writes mystery novels and screenplays and belongs to the Mystery Writers of America.

• Responsible for delivery of analytics service and solutions
• Over 10 years of analytics experience across various verticals including financial services, CPG and hospitality
• Expertise in applications of analytics to enhance marketing effectiveness, risk management, CRM & consumer insights processes
• Responsible for overall service delivery across multiple client engagements
• Post Graduate degree in marketing sciences from the Department of Management Studies at IIT Madras

With over 20 years of experience in eCommerce and Payments, Alok's latest venture Inkiru, Inc. tackles transactional analytics challenges for merchants and financial institutions with a predictive intelligence platform. His prior experience includes tenures across the entire ecommerce value chain. He provided technical leadership in architecture and implementation of key services on the Acquirer System for Credit & Debit Transactions at Visa, Built a world-class architecture function that supported and scaled the eBay Marketplace website, Created and led a corporate function focused on defining the technology vision for eBay and creating an interoperable architecture across the various business units, Manage Global Engineering design and development teams that delivered to Fraud loss objectives at PayPal. Alok is an active angel investor in Silicon Valley eCommerce and Payments startups.

For the past 5 years, Bob Biermann has served as the Senior Econometrician within the actuarial department for the Selective Insurance Group. His focus in claims modeling has centered on the identification of fraudulent claims and missed subrogation opportunities within Selective's personal and commercial lines, including Personal Auto and Workers Comp. Bob's responsibilities also include Text Mining, Selective's Enterprise Modeling Environment, and providing technical support to Selective's BI group. Formerly, Bob spent 10 years providing analytical, predictive modeling and enterprise risk management consulting to a wide variety of clients across many industries, including GM, ON Star, BOA, Xerox, and Master Card. Bob also taught for 20 years at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in both the CLA's Economics department and COB's MBA program. Bob's academic work focused on dealing with selectivity biases and censored data in predictive modeling.

Bio is forthcoming!

Sameer Chopra is Vice President of Advanced Analytics at Orbitz Worldwide, Inc., a leading global online travel company. He has more than 16 years of experience in applying data mining and predictive analytics across various business domains at both Fortune 500 firms and startups.

Before joining Orbitz, Sameer was in the senior leadership team of Intuit's Small Business Group (SBG) where he led Marketing Analytics and Web testing. Prior to Intuit, Sameer was with eBay for many years where he served as Director of Analytics - working across different areas such as Internet Marketing, Fraud Detection, Global Site Experimentation etc. Sameer holds a Master's degree in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He holds an undergraduate degree (Summa Cum Laude) in Mathematics with a minor in Computer Science from Allegheny College, where he graduated valedictorian.

Dr. John Elder heads the US's leading data mining consulting team -- with offices in Charlottesville Virginia, Washington DC, Baltimore Maryland, and Manhasset New York. Founded in 1995, Elder Research (www.datamininglab.com) focuses on investment, commercial and security applications of advanced analytics, including text mining, credit scoring, image recognition, process optimization, cross-selling, drug efficacy, market 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 18 years at 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 a frequent keynote speaker, and was co-chair of the 2009 Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining conference, in Paris. John was honored to serve for 5 years on a panel appointed by President Bush to guide technology for National Security. His book with Bob Nisbet and Gary Miner, Handbook of Statistical Analysis & Data Mining Applications, won the PROSE award for Mathematics in 2009. His book with Giovanni Seni, Ensemble Methods in Data Mining, was published in February 2010, and his book on Practical Text Mining, with Andrew Fast and 4 others, won the 2012 PROSE Award for top book in Computing and Information Sciences.

John is honored to be a follower of Christ and father of 5.

Josh Ellis is a Director in the Analytics Practice within Deloitte Financial Advisory Services LLP. He has over 12 years specializing in leveraging technology and analytics in the Fraud Investigation and Corruption arena. He worked and operated for 8 years in The Eastern Bloc and Former Soviet countries combatting Fraud in manufacturing, retail and the telecommunications sectors, before serving on the Board at the UK’s Serious Fraud Office for two years. He holds a 1st Class Honors Bachelor of Japanese and Linguistics, from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

As Senior Director of Mobile, Media & Entertainment, Eric provides leadership to ForeSee’s mobile solutions as well as solutions related to the media and entertainment industries. He is responsible for working with product, delivery, sales, and marketing teams to ensure that ForeSee continues to bring innovation and operational excellence to its mobile offerings. Since joining ForeSee in 2004, Eric has been contributing to the strategic growth of the organization. He brings 15 years of customer-focused experience to the team, and is a frequent presenter at conferences in the U.S. and UK.

Eric is currently on the Board of Directors for the Digital Analytics Association (DAA) and serves as an instructor for various trade groups on the importance and application of attitudinal analytics. Previously, he has held positions that include web analyst, multichannel strategy consultant, usability specialist and focus group moderator. His goal is to best understand and motivate multi-channel consumers on behalf of his clients.

Eric is a graduate of the University of Michigan.

Frank is the Director of Risk Management at Paychex, a leading provider of payroll, human resource, and benefits outsourcing solutions for small- to medium-sized businesses. Fiorille has over 20 years experience in risk management and credit and joined Paychex in 2002 to lead the company's initiative to build an enterprise wide risk apparatus.

Before joining Paychex he spent four years with PNC Financial working in their Corporate Credit Policy area. Prior to his work with PNC, he spent twelve years with Citigroup holding various risk management and credit roles. He is a graduate of the inaugural 2007 class at the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania advanced risk management programme.

He was named as one of the 100 Most Influential People in Finance-Treasury & Risk Magazine in 2008 and 2009. He is credited for leading successful projects to build the first risk and retention models in both the educational lending and payroll outsourcing industries.

John Foreman is the Chief Data Scientist at MailChimp.com, an email marketing service. John's main focus is MailChimp's Email Genome Project, which analyzes millions of email lists - and hundreds of millions of email addresses - to find stories and trends in the data. This research helps MailChimp understand the email ecosystem, prevent abuse, and create better experiences for everyone.

Rayid Ghani was the Chief Scientist at Obama for America 2012 campaign focusing on analytics, technology, and data. His work focused on improving different functions of the campaign including fundraising, volunteer, and voter targeting and mobilization using analytics, social media, and machine learning. Before joining the campaign, Rayid was a Senior Research Scientist and Director of Analytics research at Accenture Labs where he led a technology research team focused on applied R&D in analytics, machine learning, and data mining for large-scale & emerging business problems in various industries including healthcare, retail & CPG, manufacturing, intelligence, and financial services. In addition, Rayid serves as an adviser to several start-ups in Analytics, is an active organizer of and participant in academic and industry analytics conferences, and publishes regularly in machine learning and data mining conferences and journals.

Anthony Goldbloom is the founder and CEO of Kaggle, the leading platform for data prediction competitions that allows organizations to post their data and have it scrutinized by the world's best data scientists. In 2011, Forbes Magazine cited Anthony as one of the 30 under 30 in technology and Fast Company featured him as one of the innovative thinkers who are changing the future of business.

Sergo leads global efforts in enterprise technology architecture, analytics, and systems road mapping at Crawford & Company. His responsibilities include providing direction and leadership for development of business intelligence technology and statistical, data mining, and predictive analytic models for claim operations and client stewardship. Sergo has 16 years of technology industry experience; he has proven success in increasing maturity of enterprise technology architecture and in wide adoption of advanced analytics and business intelligence at organizations of various sizes; he earned a master's degree in management science and a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics and computer science.

Bangalore Gunashakar is the Senior Technical Consultant of Broadspire - a Crawford & Company, the world's largest independent claims management provider servicing the insurance industry and self-insured organizations through a global network of more than 700 locations in 63 countries. In this role he has architectural, development, implementation responsibility for e-Triage application. He has been involved with e-Triage since its acquisition by Crawford over four years ago and has been the IT evangelist of the e-Triage product.

Prior to his current position, Bangalore served as IT Director, at Broadspire and has been promoted to positions of increasing responsibility, from Senior Software Engineer through IT Director. Since 1993 he has been delivering sound IT solutions to achieve strategic business goals. He has spent last 10 years in Insurance industry, providing IT leadership and delivering numerous strategic Projects and Products. He's a 'Certified Document Imaging Architect' and holds the 'Project Management Professional' certification from Project Management Institute since 2005.

Shawn Hushman is the vice president of advanced analytics at Kelley Blue Book. In this role, Hushman is charged with enterprise-wide predictive and Web analytics. He also oversees the development of Kelley Blue Book's valuation models and overall analytics methodology.

Since joining the Kelley Blue Book team, Hushman has had a number of accomplishments in pricing theory and optimization. Hushman developed multi-dimensional pricing simulation tools, which optimized the relationship between time on market and transaction volume. He also was instrumental in developing a negotiation algorithm, called 'virtual negotiation', which utilizes consumer and competitive cross-elasticities to maximize profits by individual customer transactions.

Prior to joining Kelley Blue Book, Hushman worked in research and analytics at several companies, including The Clorox Company, HSBC, The Ryness Company and Sempra Energy.

Shawn holds a Master's degree in Economics with a field specialization in Econometrics. He also has completed postgraduate work in Applied Econometrics.

Jean-Paul Isson recently co-authored a 2012 book : Win With Advanced Business Analytics : Creating Business Value from your Data. He is an internationally recognized speaker and an expert in advanced business analytics. Mr. Isson is global vice president of business intelligence and predictive analytics at Monster Worldwide, Inc..Where he has built his global business intelligence team from the ground up and successfully conceived and implemented global customer scoring/segmentation, predictive modeling, and Web mining applications building across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Prior to joining Monster, Isson led the global customer behavior modeling team at Rogers Wireless. He holds a master's degree in mathematics and applied statistics from the University of Paris 6 in France. He is a guest lectured at MBA programs including McGill Concordia Universities.

Isson has been a speaker for IDC Forbes TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute), SAS® data mining conferences, the Premier Business Leadership Series, Measure Up, Predictive Analytics World, BusinessAnalyticsNews.com, IT World Canada, IT Business, 1to1 Media, IQCP, eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit/SMX, and at The Institute for International Research other SAS and IDC events.
He has over eighteen years of experience in advanced business analytics focusing on customer behavior modeling scoring and market segmentation.

He has several articles related to his successful implementation of BI solutions and he gave interviews on business news magazines and TV to cover Business Intelligence and Monster Employment Index.

Madhu Iyer is a Marketing Statistician at Intuit's Data Sciences and Analytics team. She consults with marketers across the company to provide unique insights using the collective data of 50 million customers. Madhu has a background in research, and consulting. Prior to Intuit, she was a Scientist at Exponent working extensively on the application of statistical methods to business environments. Her work covered issues related to the evaluation of passenger vehicle field performance, multivariate analysis, survival analysis, design of experiments, and analysis of survey data.

With over 16 years of work experience, Anil Kaul has emerged as a prominent figure in the field of BigData, Predictive Analytics and Market Research. His expertise areas range from marketing, strategic consulting and quantitative modeling. He has gained valuable experience in consulting with many Fortune 500 companies. He spent four years with McKinsey & Co. in New York and Chicago, thereafter he joined Anubis Inc., an innovative data warehousing start-up as a part of the four-member top management team. Anil led the repositioning of Anubis from a pure technology play to an e-marketing analysis company by developing a cutting-edge e-analysis software product. He was also involved in an innovative technology start ups in Silicon Valley.

In 2001, Anil founded AbsolutData, a leading global Analytics and Market research company with offices in US and India, serving Fortune 1000 clients all over the world and more than 300 employees. He is not just the CEO but also a guiding force at AbsolutData. In addition to providing overall leadership to AbsolutData Research and Analytics, Anil is also engaged across the client community.

He has published many articles in leading management and academic journals such as McKinsey Quarterly, Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research and International Journal of Research in Marketing. One of his papers was nominated for "Paul Green Award" by the American Marketing Association. He has also addressed many gatherings at McKinsey & Co., Dartmouth College, Cornell University, Yale University, Columbia University, New York University as well as at IIFT, IMT Ghaziabad and IIM Lucknow.

A driven individual, Anil is a bit of a workaholic, but he is very passionate about hiking and trekking. He recently hiked Mount Whitney, the highest peak in continental United States, in one day. Hiking to the base camp for Mount Everest is his plan for next year.

Anil completed his PhD in Marketing and MS from Cornell University after pursuing MBA from University of Delhi.

A Predictive Analytics leader who has worked in industries like insurance, banking, online retail and payments, Jaya has been using predictive analytics for the past two decades to solve business problems ranging from marketing segmentation and targeting to credit risk and fraud. Jaya is currently the Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Inkiru, a technology company building the Inkiru Predictive Intelligence™ Platform to allow data scientists to build and deploy predictive algorithms that can influence customer experience in real-time.

Prior to co-founding Inkiru, Jaya spent four years at eBay/PayPal developing infrastructure to facilitate real-time linking of customers across eBay properties to enhance customer experience. In the three years prior to this, Jaya was responsible for managing Risk Analytics at PayPal. Her other roles include five years at Amazon.com, and prior to that, Jaya spent several years at Bank One working in the Credit Policy organization.

Natalie Kortum is a Decision Sciences Manager at Dell in Investment Optimization. She works in measuring and optimizing long-term impacts of difficult to measure influences such as brand campaigns, corporate social responsibility, product quality and customer service offerings and has recently received a patent for her cutting-edge modeling design. Recently, she has created an innovative method of modeling brand impacts and has expanded her scope outside of marketing to model total quality management projects and services initiatives.

In previous roles, she has worked in pricing analysis, promo management, web analytics, financial planning, and remote employee management.

She received her undergrad in Mathematics from Texas A&M and her MBA in Marketing and Financial Consulting from Southern Methodist University.

www.marketingmathgirl.com

David Kreutter is Vice President, Business Analytics and Insights with accountability for developing business insights, measuring execution effectiveness, and leading innovation and continuous improvement across the worldwide biopharmaceutical business. David joined Pfizer in 1986 as a Research Scientist and has held positions of increasing scientific responsibility for Diabetes and Obesity research. He authored more than 50 articles and abstracts.

In 2003, David was appointed Vice President of the Portfolio and Decision Analysis Group with responsibility for facilitating Pfizer's management of the R&D and drug portfolios. In 2007 David was appointed Vice President, U.S. Commercial Operations with accountability for enabling Pfizer's US sales and marketing strategies.

David received an M.S. and Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Hahnemann University and did postdoctoral work at Yale University. David is a member of IBM's Business Analytics and Optimization Advisory Council and a director on the board of VPSN.

Pankaj is a Mechanical Engineer from VNIT, Nagpur, and holds a Doctorate degree in Management Sciences from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. Pankaj has over 15 years of experience in Analytics, Research and Risk Management. He joined Genpact in 1998 and was one of the first few people who started offshore Analytics teams in India.

He helped various GE businesses set up the analytics teams till 2005. Pankaj then moved to GE Money UK where he was the Chief Risk Officer for the Loans business and led risk management for various portfolios. He rejoined Genpact in 2008.

Currently, Pankaj leads the Analytics & Research center of excellence for Genpact and is chartered to deliver significant business impact to our customers through data driven strategies.

Aaron Lai, CFA, is the Senior Manager of Marketing Analytics of Blue Shield of California in San Francisco and formerly a VP and Senior Quantitative Research Associate of the Bank of America. He has over 15 years experience in consumer analytics and database marketing for financial institutions and has several patents currently pending. He has published in academic journals and professional magazines and has presented in international data-mining conferences. He also served on the CFA examination curriculum committee and is on the CFA Magazine Advisory committee. He received a B.Sc.(Hons) in Finance (City University of Hong Kong), a B.Sc.(Econ)(Hons) in Management Studies (University of London), a MBA (Purdue University), and a M.Sc. in Sociology (University of Oxford). In addition to his duty as the President of the Oxford University Society Northern California Branch, he is also pursuing a M.Sc. in Evidence-based Healthcare from Oxford University.

Satish Lalchand is a Director at Deloitte Financial Advisory Services LLP, specializing in advanced analytics & big data , business rules development and modeling. His areas of expertise includes: financial investigations, Enterprise Fraud Management (EFM) and anti-money laundering investigations. He has a master's degree in computer information systems and a bachelor's degree in economics.

Anne-Elise Lansdown is a Marketing Manager at Minted.com. She is responsible for direct-to-consumer marketing, with a focus on email, catalog and direct mail. Minted is a VC-backed social commerce start-up that crowdsources and sells unique paper goods designed by independent graphic designers.

Prior to Minted, she was a consultant for the Boston Consulting Group in Chicago, IL and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Ms. Lansdown earned an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and a Bachelor's degree in Economics and French from Vanderbilt University.

Eric Legrand is a Marketing Data Consultant at Wells Fargo where he focuses on building tools to measure marketing performance. He has developed compelling analyses, visualizations, and dashboards that are used both by executives as well as operational managers. Previous to Wells Fargo, Eric managed pricing and cost models at Niman Ranch, a leading natural meat company. Prior to Niman Ranch, he worked as a software developer at a number of start-ups that are no longer with us. Eric studied mathematics and philosophy at Wheaton College, IL, received a certificate in Management Science and Engineering at Stanford, and is currently working on an MS in Predictive Analytics at Northwestern University. Eric lives with his wife and daughter in San Francisco, CA.

Keshav is currently the Manager- Global Analytics Finance at Hewlett Packard. Overall, he has 9 years of experience and close to 2 years in predictive modeling in the areas of Finance - Structure Finance, Corporate Finance, Securitization and Investment Banking. He has been deeply involved in the entire deal process, i.e., conducted due diligence of institutions, selected appropriate receivables to minimize risk, modeled cash flows, fund raising, lead meetings with investors and finalization of legal documents. Prior to joining HP, he graduated with an MBA from Hult International Business School.

Wenqing Lu has a Ph.D. in statistics from University of Wisconsin-Madison and B.S. in Operations Research from Fudan University. Dr. Lu is leading an Advanced Analytics team at Orbitz Worldwide - building statistical models for online marketing.

Prior to Orbitz, he was at eBay working on website testing and optimization in eBay's global Experimentation group. He started his career as a statistician in the financial industry and has over 13 years of experience in the area of predictive modeling & data science.

Ms. Lupetini's career spans a broad range predictive analytics and optimization implementations for many Fortune 500 companies. She has tackled challenges in the internet, marketing, high tech, and healthcare domains. Currently, she manages the Engineering Advanced Analytics team in Qualcomm Technologies Inc. which implements models to enhance semi-conductor chip characteristics and improve engineering management decision making. In addition, she manages a team in which optimizes the portfolio of the high dollar software assets used to design semi-conductor chips for cell phones and tablets. Maria has patents pending for pattern recognition inventions. Prior to joining Qualcomm, Ms. Lupetini was President and founder of InfoMaker Inc. a consulting firm specializing in Advanced Analytics. During her tenure, InfoMaker was recognized an INC 500 company in 1999. Ms. Lupetini earned an MBA at the University of Chicago, and a Masters of Science degree in Operations Research from the University of Minnesota, Institute of Technology.

Jyotirmay Nag is currently Business Analyst of RnD Analytics at Hewlett-Packard. He has 1.5 years of experience in Data Mining, Predictive Modeling in the areas of HR, Marketing, Sales, Finance, etc. Prior to Hewlett-Packard, he finished his Master of Statistics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

Ed Nazarko is an IBM Client Technical Advisor who works with healthcare payers on applying innovative technologies to solve customer problems, and industry problems. His focus is on combining technology innovation with customer-focused business and operations strategy. Recent projects have included performance engineering of large systems, application of combinatorial test design to optimization of ICD-10 test cases, creation of benefit rule abstraction and change validation tools, and traditional system design and build. As a consultant he has worked with pharmaceutical, device, healthcare delivery, and health insurers on a wide range of operational and strategic technology issues. He has also been in startups in life sciences, e-business and research. Ed has a BA from Reed College in Portland OR and an MBA from Boston University.

Avinash Parthasarathy, Analytics Consultant in Global Analytics, HP, holds a masters in business analytics and 3 years of professional work experience in data processing and customer analytics. Avinash is a consultant responsible for providing analytical support to various Marketing and CRM projects from HP's Channel CRM program and Snapfish business. His main function includes applying Statistical & Predictive Modeling techniques, Customer Segmentation techniques, and Campaign analytics to enable informed decision-making and effective marketing strategies.

Jim Porzak is the Senior Director, Business Intelligence at Minted.com. Previously, he was the Senior Data Scientist at Viadeo.com - the international professional social network, the Senior Director of Marketing Analytics at Ancestry.com and VP Marketing Analytics at LoyaltyMatrix. Subscription survival modeling has been part of Jim's standard tool box since LoyaltyMatrix where he applied for many clients like The Los Angeles Times, 24 Hour Fitness, and Playboy online.

Jim is a well-known presenter at customer intelligence and applied statistical conferences here and in Europe. He is very active in the open-source R community and is co-founder of the San Francisco Bay Area R User Group.

Chris created, hired, and leads a team of Data Scientists whose charter is to help add statistical firepower to some of Netflix’s more complex analyses (for example demand prediction for how much a movie will be watched to help Netflix's content buyers understand the value of a movie), and assist in algorithmic development for better personalization (for example movie similars, user clustering, and movie ranking). Chris is also an adviser to venture funded startups, including Bonobos, Plum District, and Mahoot.

Raymond Reno is a senior vice president in Market Strategies International's Marketing Sciences Group. Ray specializes in the design of consumer segmentations and market frameworks, assessment of the differentiation of brand equities and the identification and quantification of potential brand value propositions. He has applied these techniques across numerous industries including telecommunications, financial services, insurance, pharmaceutical and healthcare. Prior to joining Market Strategies, Ray served the Chicago-based consulting firms of McKinsey & Company and Envision as a marketing/branding expert within the pharmaceutical, insurance and service industries.

Greta Roberts is the CEO of Talent Analytics, Corp and a faculty member at the International Institute of Analytics. Her mission is to use technology to enable businesses to understand and value their employees in the language business and shareholders understand; the language of numbers. In addition to 20+ years working for world-class technology innovators like Lotus, Netscape, WebLine, Cisco and Open Ratings, Greta's vision has been enhanced by a keen ability to approach old problems through a unique and pragmatic business-first lens thereby capturing first mover advantage. This approach has led to the development and adoption of an analytics-driven talent platform that enables 450+ innovative companies to solve tomorrow's performance challenges years ahead of the curve. Greta is a sought-out thought leader, presenter, and author and a Faculty Member of the International Institute for Analytics. She has been published in the Harvard Business Review blog network and has recently been quoted in Forbes, Computerworld and VentureBeat.

Sara Roberts is the Team Leader of Advanced Analytics at ConAgra Foods. Her team assists the HR community in making data-driven decisions by applying appropriate research methods and advanced statistical analyses, including data mining and predictive modeling, to organizational questions. Sara holds a Ph.D. in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and is certified in Relational Database Fundamentals and Structured Query Language (SQL) by the Nebraska Business Development Center. Sara also serves as an adjunct faculty member in the College of Business Administration at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Sara resides in Omaha, Nebraska with her husband, Colin, daughter, Emma, and two rescue dogs, Ike and Rascal.

Inna Shapotina is a Senior Technical Data Analyst at Intuit's Data Sciences and Analytics team. She works across the different functions at Intuit to identify metrics and analyze data that drive the business. Inna has an extensive background in data analysis in various fields. Prior to joining Intuit, among other roles, she worked in a non-profit research organization, clinical trial company, financial and accounting firms.

Rose Shattuck is the Senior Director of Marketing at Minted.com, where she is responsible for overseeing direct marketing to drive sales and increase customer lifetime value. Minted (www.minted.com) is a VC-backed social commerce startup that crowdsources and sells unique paper goods designed by independent graphic designers.

Wenlei Shi has more than 15 years of financial services experience. She specializes in data integration, data mining and statistical modeling. With Scotiabank since 2006, she is responsible for applying the data mining techiques and statistical analysis to develop forecases, predictive models and other data mining projects to support various of business lines. She has extensive experience in all aspects of data mining and has solved many challenges in different fields both inside and outside of the bank. Wenlei has Masters degree in Statistics from University of Toronto and bachelors degree in Computer Science from HUST (Huazhong University of Science and Technology).

The president of Prediction Impact, Inc., author of the acclaimed book, Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die, Executive Editor of the Predictive Analytics Times, and the founder of Predictive Analytics World and Text Analytics World, Eric Siegel is an expert in predictive analytics and data mining and a former computer science professor at Columbia University, where he won the engineering school's award for teaching, including graduate-level courses in machine learning and intelligent systems - the academic terms for predictive analytics. After Columbia, Dr. Siegel co-founded two software companies for customer profiling and data mining, and then started Prediction Impact in 2003, providing predictive analytics services and training to mid-tier through Fortune 100 companies.

Dr. Siegel is the instructor of the acclaimed training program, Predictive Analytics for Business, Marketing and Web, and the online version, Predictive Analytics Applied. He has published over 20 papers and articles in data mining research and computer science education and has served on 10 conference program committees.

Ashish is an analytics professional with 2 years of experience in the area of Business Analytics, Strategic Consulting and Business Planning. Currently he is part of strategy team at Global Analytics, Hewlett Packard. He graduated with an MBA from National Institute of Technology, Trichy.

Marc Smith is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. Smith leads the Connected Action Consulting Group and lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. Smith co-founded the Social Media Research Foundation (http://www.smrfoundation.org/), a non-profit devoted to open tools, data, and scholarship related to social media research.

Smith is the co-editor with Peter Kollock of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), a collection of essays exploring the ways identity; interaction and social order develop in online groups. Along with Derek Hansen and Ben Shneiderman, he is the co-author and editor of Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, from Morgan-Kaufmann which is a guide to mapping connections created through computer-mediated interactions.

Smith received a B.S. in International Area Studies from Drexel University in Philadelphia in 1988, an M.Phil. in social theory from Cambridge University in 1990, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA in 2001. He is an affiliate faculty at the Department of Sociology at the University of Washington and the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. Smith is also a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Media-X Program at Stanford University.

Dr. Srinidhi is currently an Analytics Consultant at Hewlett-Packard R&D. He has more than 1.5 years of experience in predictive modeling in the areas of Finance, Social Media and Marketing. Prior to joining HP, he finished his MS and PhD in Management from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

As Senior Director of Marketing Operations at Citrix, Eva manages global marketing systems to enable demand generation and drives analytics to predict and measure buyer behaviour. Eva has more than 15 years of experience in managing enterprise marketing and sales systems. Eva joined Citrix from Fiserv, where she served as the consulting director overseeing strategic implementations for top 10 US banks. Before Fiserv, Eva held director roles at BEA Systems, which was acquired by Oracle in 2008. Her responsibilities included ownership of marketing web properties and automation solutions, management of company-wide IT initiatives, and delivery of a patented web application. Prior to BEA, Eva held strategic roles at BroadVision and Oracle, launching enterprise websites for Fortune 500 companies. Eva holds a BS and an MS in Computer Science, and a Minor in Economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Noe is currently the Customer Research Manager for insurance at the California State Automobile Association (CSAA). Prior to joining CSAA, Noe worked for Deloitte Consulting as a project lead at the Advanced Quantitative Services Group and for the Allstate Research and Planning Center data mining and modeling Groups as a senior researcher. He has published papers on research methods in various journals and presented in conferences. Related to the current topic, Noe presented a paper at the Advanced Research Techniques Forum comparing the use of logistic regression, decision trees, and hybrid combination of the two on predicting short-term defection. He also taught research methods at the Cal State University East Bay and was a research co-investigator at the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center.

After 15 years as an accountant and management consultant, Willemse joined Crawford & Company in 1998 as a senior adjuster in South Africa, where he handled property, fidelity guarantee, business interruption and rail transportation claims, including international assignments. In 2004, he was promoted to the position of managing director of operations in sub-Saharan Africa, where he implemented various leadership development and change management programs and managed strategic planning and business development activities.

Bob Wood is currently serving as Director of Merkle Analytics' product team. In addition to 12 years of marketing leadership experience in the finance, consumer goods, and telecommunications verticals, he holds a BS/MS in Applied Math and an MBA from Brigham Young University, an MS from Wichita State University, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Psychology from Wichita State emphasizing consumer choice and behavioral economics.

Jane Zhong is Senior Manager of Predictive Analytics team at Scotiabank. She leads the team to provide advanced analytical services for retail banking, and is responsible for predictive modeling, segmentation, data mining, and optimization. Jane has over 10-years analytical experience in marketing, risk management and business groups, and over 5-years research experience at various universities. Prior to Scotiabank, she worked for TD bank and Sears Canada. Jane holds both B.S. and M.S. in engineering from Northwestern Polytechnical University in China and Ph.D in Automation from the Institute of Automation Chinese Academy of Sciences. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Toronto.

Dana Zuber is a strategy and analytics executive at Wells Fargo where she was an early adopter and evangelist of using visual analytics to tell stories with data. She has led analytics teams at Wells Fargo in Wealth Management, Branch and ATM Planning and most recently in Enterprise Data and Analytics. Dana presents regularly to Wells Fargo executive leadership teams in addition to speaking at conferences. She is a guest speaker on the topic of data visualization and analytics at Stanford, Sonoma State University, The University of San Francisco and Mills College. Prior to Wells Fargo, Dana has worked at companies such as Walmart.com, L'Oreal USA and Canadian Tire.

Dana has a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Queen's University in Canada and an MBA from The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. Dana lives with her family in the Bay Area in Northern California.