Speakers

Dean Abbott is President of Abbott Analytics and currently is the Bodily Bicentennial Professor in Analytics at UVA Darden School of Business. He is an internationally recognized thought leader and innovator in data science and predictive analytics with more than three decades of experience solving a wide range of private and public sector problems. Mr. Abbott is the author of Applied Predictive Analytics (Wiley, 2014) and coauthor of The IBM SPSS Modeler Cookbook (Packt Publishing, 2013).

Tommy is currently Data Science Lead at Fresenius Medical Care North America. His team uses data science broadly across the organization to create predictive models and advanced analytics support for a diverse set of company needs. Central to his team’s goals is the use of machine learning to improve medical care of the many chronically ill patients Fresenius provides care for. Tommy holds a Bachelor’s in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, completed his PhD at the University of Rochester in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and performed his post-doctoral research at Harvard University.

Jason Burke is the System Vice President and Chief Analytics Officer for the UNC Health Care System, a senior advisor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine‘s Center for Innovation, and the principal at Burke Advisory Group.  Previously, he was the founder, managing director and chief strategist of an industry-leading think tank pioneering novel approaches to improving health with emerging technologies, data and analytics.  He also served as global head of health and life sciences strategy, research and development for SAS, as well as holding strategy and management roles in organizations such as Microsoft, Quintiles, and GlaxoSmithKline.  With over 20 years of experience, his contributions cover all aspects of new business strategies, product development, information technology, sales and marketing.  His most recent book is called Health Analytics: Gaining the Insights to Transform Health Care (Wiley, 2013), and he has appeared in numerous publications including Forbes, Becker’s Hospital Review, Information Management, InformationWeek, Health Management Technology, PharmaVoice, Drug Discovery and Development, and BioIT World.  Burke is a cognitive neuroscientist by training, holding degrees from Virginia Tech and the University of Missouri – Columbia.

James Casaletto is studying bioinformatics and biomedical engineering at UC Santa Cruz.  Previously, he worked at MapR Technologies where he designed, implemented, and deployed complete solution frameworks for big data. He has written and delivered courses on MapReduce programming, data engineering, and data science on Hadoop to thousands of students around the world.

Ben Cleveland has led data science at UnityPoint Health since 2014. He and his team design and
operationalize data products that use advanced data modeling techniques for the purposes of clinical
excellence, strategic planning, and improvement within a large health system. Ben is a nationally
recognized data science practitioner with speaking invitations at analytics, IT, and data science events
across the country. He’s also received several awards for healthcare data science innovation, including
most recently the “Most Needed in Your Health System” at the 2022 Healthcare Analytics Summit and
runner-up in the 2022 Innovation Awards by Healthcare Innovation.

Jeff Deal is the Chief Operating Officer for Elder Research, the nation's leading data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence consultancy. He has also been the Chair of the Predictive Analytics World for Healthcare conference since its inception in 2014.  In his role at Elder Research, Jeff oversees the operations of the business including contracting, finances, regulatory/legal issues and human resources. Jeff has worked with dozens of clients to understand their business needs and organizational goals and, in the process, has gained insight into organizational obstacles to successful data analytics engagements. His talk on the Top 10 Data Mining Business Mistakes has been well received at prior Predictive Analytics World conferences. In 2016, Jeff and the Elder Research President & CEO, Gerhard Pilcher, published, Mining Your Own Business: A Primer for Executives on Understanding and Employing Data Mining and Predictive Analytics.

Jeff has more than 30 years of experience in business operations, planning, and government relations, primarily in the health care industry. Prior to ERI, he was the president of a health planning consulting business that assisted hospitals and physicians with operational analysis, forecasting, and navigating through complex regulatory processes. Before that, Jeff spent 16 years in hospital administration with responsibility for clinical, support, and planning functions. Jeff has a Master of Health Administration degree from Virginia Commonwealth University and an undergraduate degree from the College of William and Mary.

John Elder chairs America’s most experienced Data Science consultancy. Founded in 1995, Elder Research has offices in Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, Washington DC, and London. Dr. Elder co-authored 3 award-winning books on analytics, was a discoverer of ensemble methods, chairs international conferences, and is a popular keynote speaker. John is occasionally an Adjunct Professor of Systems Engineering at the University of Virginia.

Chris is the Chair of Predictive Analytics World Healthcare and the Vice President of Advanced Analytics for OSF Healthcare where he leads a team of data scientists and automation engineers who create and deploy industry leading advanced analytics solutions.  He has more than 16 years of experience working in healthcare and holds a MS in Predictive Analytics from Northwestern University, where he focused on advanced modeling techniques and predictive text mining.

Dr. Garberson develops machine learning algorithms to screen for childhood cognitive conditions such as autism at Cognoa. This development work ranges from analyses to identify and compensate for defects in data that will be used in machine learning to development and optimization of the algorithms to analyzing clinical study results to validate the performance of the algorithms in real life. 

Prior to joining Cognoa, Dr. Garberson spent two years developing machine learning algorithms for energy and consumer comfort optimization in smart thermostats at a startup called EcoFactor. Before that he ran analyses on petabytes of data collected at particle colliders, including the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, to search for statistically significant evidence of new fundamental particles and to perform more precise measurements of the properties of existing particles. 

Rhiannon Harms is the Executive Director of Strategic Analytics at UnityPoint Health, where she leads efforts to both deliver best-in-class analytics solutions, as well as matures the analytics aptitude of a $5Bm multi-state, integrated delivery system located in Iowa, Illinois and Wisconsin. Harms is focused on partnering with clinical and business leaders to use data to solve for today's healthcare challenges. With expertise across clinical, operational, and financial domains, Harms is a nationally recognized analytics leader with speaking invitations at analytics, IT and population health events across the country. Harms' team was awarded the Business Analytics Innovation Award from the Center of Business Analytics at Loras College, Analytics All-Star Project of the Year in Patient Safety from Health Data Management, and Finalist for the 2016 ANNY Award from the International Institute for Analytics.

Lucienne (Lucie) Ide, M.D., Ph.D., a healthcare innovator and founder of Rimidi, Inc., brings her diverse experiences in medicine, science, venture capital and technology to transforming the delivery of chronic care management.  Rimidi’s cloud-based diabetes management platform provides a comprehensive solution for healthcare systems that connects healthcare providers with their patients.  Rimidi enables providers to receive a clear snapshot of each patient's diabetes numbers and unique needs by merging patient and clinical data and provides them with decision support tools to make individualized treatment decisions.

Dr. Ide founded RImidi with the purpose of improving the health of the chronically ill and the healthcare system as a whole.  “Our digital health technology helps health systems achieve the Triple Aim of improved outcomes, better patient experience and lower overall cost of care for patients with diabetes,” says Dr. Ide. 

Prior to starting Rimidi in 2012, Dr. Ide worked as a physicist at the National Security Agency, Raytheon Systems Corporation and Monarch Capital Partners, a venture capital firm. She holds a joint M.D./Ph.D. degree from Emory University, and completed her medical training at the University of Pennsylvania Medical College’s Magee Womens’ Hospital in Pittsburgh.

A speaker on women in technology and digital health innovation, Dr. Ide has been a guest speaker at many health IT conferences and has been published on Forbes.com. A member of the App Association, an industry trade organization advocating healthcare reform, she has spent time on Capitol Hill meeting with legislative officials about digital health. She also is a board member of the Georgia Community Leadership Board of the American Diabetes Association and a founder of I Can Be The Change, a not-for-profit focused on educating youth on obesity-related health issues.

Rimidi has been named a Top 5 Company to Watch by the Georgia Pharmacists Association and a Top 10 Innovative Company in Georgia by the Technology Association of Georgia. Rimidi also is an ATDC Select Company. Additionally, the company received a “Platinum” ranking by BAnalytics as a socially conscious company.

Rimidi has been featured in Reuters, The Economist, The Huffington Post, and MobiHealth News, as well as local media, including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Atlanta Business Chronicle.

Dr. Ide lives in Atlanta with her husband and their four sons.

 Gaurav's experience as a Principal working with three leading Management Consultancies has led to extensive exposure in multiple industries. Deep understand of both business and technology aspects has led to implementing a wide array of transformational initiatives ranging from operational strategy to change management

Max Kuhn is a software engineer at RStudio. a leading company for R software and tools. He is currently working on improving R's modeling capabilities. He has a Ph.D. in Biostatistics.

Max was a Director of Nonclinical Statistics at Pfizer Global R&D in Connecticut. He was applying models in the pharmaceutical and diagnostic industries for over 18 years. Max is the author of eight R packages for techniques in machine learning and reproducible research and is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Statistical Software. He, and Kjell Johnson, wrote the book Applied Predictive Modeling, which won the Ziegel award from the American Statistical Association, which recognizes the best book reviewed in Technometrics in 2015.

He has taught courses on modeling, including many classes for Predictive Analytics World, the useR! conference, the Open Data Science Conference, the India Ministry of Information Technology, and others.

Andrew Long is a Data Scientist at Fresenius Medical Care North America (FMCNA). Andrew holds a PhD in biomedical engineering from Johns Hopkins University and a Master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Northwestern University. Andrew joined FMCNA last year after participating in the Insight Health Data Fellows Program. At FMCNA, he is responsible for building predictive models using machine learning to improve the quality of life of every patient who receives dialysis from FMCNA. He is currently creating a model to predict which patients are at the highest risk of imminent hospitalization.

Ricky Loynd is a member of the reinforcement learning research group in the Microsoft Research AI labs in Redmond, Wash. He has 25 years of experience with neural networks, and 11 years of experience in reinforcement learning. Ricky is currently focused on creating deep RL agents with more general, human-like intelligence. As a lead mentor for the Microsoft AI School Advanced Projects course, Ricky has helped teams throughout the company incorporate deep learning systems into their work.

James McCaffrey, who annually leads the full-day deep learning workshop at Machine Learning Week, works for Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash. James has a PhD in cognitive psychology and computational statistics from the University of Southern California, a BA in psychology, a BA in applied mathematics, and an MS in computer science. James learned to speak to the public while working at Disneyland as a college student, and he can still recite the entire Jungle Cruise ride narration from memory.

Arjun is the founder and CEO of Diabetes Digital Media. Arjun launched DDM's first service, Diabetes.co.uk (the world’s largest diabetes community) whilst in his first year of university in 2003 as a result of his grandfather’s quadruple heart bypass and diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. Benefiting from a decade of experience in big data and affecting user outcomes, Arjun leads the organisation's development of intelligent, evidence-based digital health interventions that harness the power of big data and machine learning to provide precise and personalized care to patients, health agencies and governments worldwide.

DDM's Low Carb Program and Gro Health digital health interventions are regulated as Software as a Medical Device and redefining chronic disease and wellness.  Over 1.8 million members use a DDM service.

Jo Quetsch serves as Interim Perioperative Leader for MultiCare Health System. She is an innovative, self-aware nurse leader who is process driven, a challenge seeker and a change agent with extensive perioperative knowledge and organizational management expertise within large health systems. Previously, Jo held several positions with Providence Health Care, most recently as Regional Director, Perioperative-Procedural Services. She received her BSN, Nursing from Mount Mercy University and an MA, Organizational Management from the University of Phoenix.

David Russell is an analytics professional who currently holds responsibility for running DataRobot's Sales & Operations across the Western US, Canada, and LATAM, markets. David has over 18 year experience focused on successful enterprise deployments in big data, predictive analytics, business intelligence, and high performance data-warehousing solutions. David's core focus is on assisting customers in growing top-line revenue and/or decreasing operations overhead by leveraging data as a strategic asset. Currently, David is helping forward thinking organizations leverage DataRobot's modern, disruptive machine learning platform to create competitive advantages across a wide spectrum of data-drive use cases.

Dr. Marc A. Smith is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. Smith leads the Connected Action consulting group. 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. He contributes to the open and free NodeXL project (http://nodexl.codeplex.com) that adds social network analysis features to the familiar Excel spreadsheet. NodeXL enables social network analysis of email, Twitter, Flickr, WWW, Facebook and other network data sets. 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 has published research on social media extensively, providing a map to the landscape of connected communities on the Internet.

David Talby is the Chief Technology Officer at John Snow Labs, helping companies apply artificial intelligence to solve real-world problems in healthcare and life science. David is the creator of Spark NLP the world's most widely used natural language processing library in the enterprise. He has extensive experience building and running web-scale software platforms and teams – in startups, for Microsoft's Bing in the US and Europe, and to scale Amazon's financial systems in Seattle and the UK. David holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Masters degrees in both Computer Science and Business Administration. He was named USA CTO of the Year by the Global 100 Awards and GameChangers Awards in 2022.

Mike serves as Head of Data Science at Uber ATG, UC Berkeley Data Science faculty, and head of Skymind Labs the Machine Learning research lab affiliated with DeepLearning4J.  He has led teams of Data Scientists in the bay area as Chief Data Scientist for InterTrust, Director of Data Sciences for MetaScale/Sears, and CSO for Galvanize where he founded the galvanizeU-UNH accredited Masters of Science in Data Science degree and oversaw the company's transformation from co-working space to Data Science organization.  Mike began his career in academia serving as a mathematics teaching fellow for Columbia University before teaching at the University of Pittsburgh. His early research focused on developing the epsilon-anchor methodology for resolving both an inconsistency he highlighted in the dynamics of Einstein’s general relativity theory and the convergence of “large N” Monte Carlo simulations in Statistical Mechanics’ universality models of criticality phenomena.

Jaya Tripathi is a Principal Scientist and an advanced analytics expert in The MITRE Corporation’s Information Technology Technical Center. 

She is the principal investigator in MITRE's effort to apply health IT concepts to address prescription drug misuse and abuse. She has been working in this domain for many years and has collaborated with law enforcement officials, physicians, policy makers, Board of Pharmacy, academicians and state and Federal partners.

She has been at MITRE for 14 years. Before joining MITRE, Ms. Tripathi worked at several multinational corporations, applying big data analytics on projects such as a customer retention forecasting pilot for a major telecommunications company, and the origin-and-destination revenue management, one of the most significant innovations in the airline industry. She holds master’s degrees in physics and computer science from the University of Texas.

Len Usvyat is a Vice President of Integrated Care Analytics with Fresenius Medical Care North America Medical Office. Len holds a Master’s Degree from the University of Pennsylvania and PhD from the University of Maastricht in Netherlands. He has over 15 years of experience in data management, analytics, research, and epidemiology. He is responsible for supporting analytical efforts for Fresenius’s integrated care assets such as its pharmacy, vascular care centers, urgent care facilities, hospitalist group, and the Fresenius health plan. These efforts vary and include activities such as routine and custom reporting, predictive modeling, outcomes analysis, and research. Len also chairs the Predictive Analytics Steering Committee in FMCNA. Prior to working with the Medical Office, he worked with Renal Research Institute, FMCNA subsidiary, on a variety of research projects related to patient outcomes and quality reporting. Len has published over 40 manuscripts in peer reviewed journals.

Matthew Vielkind is a Senior Data Scientist at CDPHP, a regional health plan in New York State, where he is responsible for building models and analytics to support the company’s population health management program.  CDPHP's population health program is enhancing traditional claims-based data with external data sources to provide a more robust view of each patient, which are leveraged to better match patients with the resources they need.  Matthew has over 10 years of experience conceptualizing and implementing models for healthcare applications with a specific focus on population health.  He has built solutions to identify gaps in physician coding, predict readmissions and ER visits, identify patients who could benefit from personalized health coaching and stratify patients by their clinical risk.  

Previously he worked at 3M Health Information Systems where he was also involved with designing and implementing payment systems and physician quality scoring programs for ACOs.  He has a specific interest modeling how behavior patterns of individual patients can provide information about what that patient’s future experience will be.

As Director of Client Services for LeanTaaS, Ashley leads collaborative efforts with over 30 top tier health care organizations to develop high ROI predictive analytics solutions that improve patient access, patient/staff satisfaction, optimize resource utilization, and reduce service delivery costs. Prior to joining LeanTaaS, Ashley was a Perioperative Business Manager at the UCHealth Metro Denver campus. She obtained her bachelor's degree in Health Science from Truman State University in Kirksville Missouri (2002) and her Masters in Health Administration from Maryville State University in St. Louis Missouri (2007). Ashley joined UCHealth in February 2009 where her responsibilities included capital and operational budget maintenance, patient billing, utilization reporting, expansion planning, and perioperative supply chain management. Ashley is lean-trained and participates in regular process improvement initiatives across UCHealth. She continues to support UCHealth as a Sr. Financial Analyst.

Jason Weinber is a Statistician at OSF Healthcare. He applies data mining, machine learning, and inferential techniques to improve operational and clinical initiatives throughout the OSF Ministry. He has 5+ years of experience in the healthcare industry and holds an MS in Health Informatics from The College of Saint Scholastica, a private Benedictine university. His academics focused on software development, biostatistics, consumer informatics, predictive modeling and data mining techniques.

Cliff is a Customer Success Data Scientist for DataRobot. He has 10 years of experience in data science helping customers across many industry verticals, including insurance, banking, healthcare, real estate, etc.
Prior to DataRobot, Cliff worked for Cisco, Verisk Analytics, and Travelers Insurance with responsibilities ranging from data science, tech sales, and management.