Data Science Influencers and Keynotes Coming to the ODSC East 2020 Virtual Conference

ODSC is proud to announce keynote speakers and other influencers for the ODSC East 2020 Virtual Conference this April 14-17 – ten preeminent researchers and visionaries who will kick off the already expert lineup set to speak at the community-based event for data science practitioners and AI engineers.

These academics, innovators, and thought leaders are leading the charge in the development and proliferation of AI across industry, and they’re all individuals worth knowing about so you can follow their research, learn about their companies’ latest developments, and see where AI is heading.

Professor Michael Kearns, PhD

Michael Kearns is a professor in the Computer and Information Science department at the University of Pennsylvania, where he holds the National Center Chair and has joint appointments in the Wharton School. He is founder of Penn’s Networked and Social Systems Engineering (NETS) program, and director of Penn’s Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences. Michael is the author of “The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design,” which is gaining traction as a must-read for understanding the ethics behind AI and how we can better plan for the future.

Margaret Mitchell, PhD

Margaret Mitchell is a Senior Research Scientist at Google, where she focuses on research around vision-language and language generation. Her work is helping Google push the bounds of computer vision and NLP, even utilizing statistics and cognitive science insights. Before Google, she was a founding member of the famous Microsoft Research “Cognition” group, which is focused on developing AI at Microsoft. Margaret’s Ted Talk, “How We Can Build AI to Help Humans, Not Hurt Us,” has been viewed almost 1.2M times, making it a popular video choice for AI enthusiasts. 

Thomas Wolf, PhD

Thomas Wolf is the Chief Science Officer of Hugging Face, one of the most popular NLP Transformer libraries, known for its ease of use and it provides a general purpose API into pretrained models such as (BERT, GPT-2, RoBERTa, etc.) Much of his research now revolves advances in NLP, NLU, Deep Learning, and Computational Linguistics. He’s an frequent blogger where he gives insights into his NLP research, and hopes to make NLP more human-friendly and easier to use.

Lester Mackey, PhD

Lester is an avid researcher and an established academic. At Microsoft, he develops new tools, models, and theory for large-scale learning tasks driven by applications from healthcare, climate, recommender systems, and the social good. He first made waves in the AI community when he co-organized the second-place team in the $1M Netflix Prize competition for collaborative filtering and won the $50K Prize4Life ALS disease progression prediction challenge.

Matei Zaharia, PhD

In 2009, Matei Zaharia of Databricks started the popular machine learning framework, Apache Spark, during his PhD at UC Berkeley. Now, he leads the MLflow development effort at Databricks, helping to produce streamlined machine learning workflow processes. As a researcher, he’s interested in computer systems for emerging large-scale workloads such as machine learning, big data analytics, and cloud computing.

Mike Stonebraker, PhD

Dr. Stonebraker has been a pioneer of database research and technology for more than forty years. He was the main architect of the INGRES relational DBMS, and the object-relational DBMS, POSTGRES. Much of his current research focuses on database technology, operating systems and the architecture of system software services.

Sarah Aerni, PhD

In her role as Director of Data Science and Engineering at Salesforce, Sarah leads the Einstein team to help bring AI to more consumers.

Francesca Lazzeri, PhD

In her work at Microsoft, Francesca leads an international team designed to create solutions to problems in energy, oil and gas, retail, aerospace, healthcare, and professional services.

John Montgomery

At Microsoft, John leads program management, research, and design teams for Developer Tools to deliver on the $1.5B Microsoft developer tools business, which includes Azure tooling and other popular AI products.

Nir Shavit, PhD

Nir is a Professor at MIT, and won the 2012 Dijkstra Prize for the introduction and first implementation of software transactional memory.

[Related article: Why Attend the ODSC Virtual Career Expo April 15th]

In addition to all of the ODSC East 2020 Virtual Conference keynotes, we will also host a number of influential data scientists as they give talks and provide hands-on workshops to help you learn important skills in-person. Here are a few more experts to know about:

• Adam Paszke: Adam created and maintains PyTorch, a popular machine learning library.
• Ali Vanderveld, PhD: Ali is the Director of Data Science at ShopRunner, where her team leverages data from a network of over 100 retailers to build products for their 6 million members
• Sebastian Raschka, PhD: Professor Raschka wrote “Python Machine Learning,” a must-read for anyone looking to get into ML using Python.
• Jacob Andreas, PhD: At MIT, Jacob’s research focuses on using language as a scaffold for more efficient learning and as a probe for understanding model behavior.
• Igor Halperin, PhD: Quant/researcher with extensive experience in building cutting-edge statistical and predictive models and advanced machine learning algorithms to solve practical problems in finance and consumer analytics.

The ODSC East 2020 Virtual Conference this April 14-17 will feature all of these speakers and more. Register by Friday, April 3rd, for 20% off all ticket types!