UCLA Career Development Conference for Graduate Students and Postdocs

I was pleased to be invited as an advisor for a full-day UCLA Career Development Conference for Graduate Students and Postdocs on May 4, 2017 on the beautiful UCLA campus. My topic of expertise: Data Science. It appears that many newly graduated Masters and Ph.D. students, as well as post doctoral researchers are interested in making the transition to the field of data science. During the round table discussions, I had the opportunity to meet with and advise many bright young minds, all of whom would make excellent data scientists. They came from a diverse set of academic disciplines including statistics, neurosciences, engineering, bio statistics, psychology just to name a few. I truly enjoy these opportunities to share my experiences in the field which I believe is the best profession around!

MapR Big Data Everywhere Los Angeles

I’m pleased to be invited to speak at an upcoming tech event here in Los Angeles: Big Data Everywhere sponsored by MapR. Big Data Everywhere is a one-day conference focused on big data technologies that brings together users and developers to share their experience via technical sessions and user success stories. I will be presenting a session on “IoT Analytics.”

The event is on Dec. 8, 2016 from 8am to 3:30pm in Santa Monica (Silicon Beach). Tickets are available HERE.

I will also be presenting the night before for MapR’s “An Evening of Digital Transformation” along with SVP Data Applications Jack Norris. This event takes place on Dec. 7 from 4-7pm in Newport Beach. Register HERE.

insideBIGDATA Guide to Healthcare & Life Sciences

I’m excited to announce the availability of a new technology guide that I was contracted to research, develop and write – “insideBIGDATA Guide to Healthcare & Life Sciences” sponsored by Dell EMC.

The healthcare and life sciences industries historically have generated vast amounts of data. These large volumes of data hold the promise of supporting a wide range of medical and healthcare tasks, including clinical analytics and decision  support, patient profiling, disease surveillance, regulatory and compliance requirements, scientific research, and many  others. Data in healthcare and life sciences is expected to grow exponentially in the coming years and will be beyond the  capability of the traditional methods of data management and data analytics. This new guide details this upward trajectory for enterprise thought leaders.

You can download a copy of the guide HERE.

AI World Conference Moderator

As Managing Editor for insideBIGDATA.com, I’ve been invited to moderate a panel for AI World Conference & Expo in San Francisco, November 7-9, 2016. The topic of the panel is “High Performance Computing for the AI Ecosystem,” and includes several industry luminaries from high-profile companies like NVIDIA, Baidu Research, and Facebook. I really enjoy attending shows like this one, at the bleeding-edge of technology innovation. I always learn a lot and it serves to help direct my own research and consulting work.

AI World is the nation’s largest AI business conference with more than 90 speakers (including 75+ CxO’s) and 40+ sponsors and exhibitors to help attendees learn how to successfully harness intelligent technologies to build competitive advantage, drive new business opportunities and accelerate innovation efforts.

Los Angeles Fashion Industry: A Data Science Perspective

Over the past year, I’ve been working on a new research project that culminated with a whitepaper in support of the Los Angeles fashion industry – “Los Angeles Fashion Industry: A Data Science Perspective.” The work was done in collaboration with LA’s premiere fashion mart, The New Mart. The paper is in response to numerous stories found in the local apparel industry trade press that held the sentiment that LA fashion had seen better days and was on a downward slide. We decided to use privately procured and publicly available data sets to find a single truth surrounding this matter. The whitepaper’s position is quite the opposite – LA fashion is a Los Angeles mainstay and continues on an upward trajectory. See for yourself by downloading the paper HERE.

 

Presentation at Grid110 Demo Day

I was pleased to present last evening at the Grid110 Demo Day hosted by The New Mart, LA’s premiere fashion mart in DTLA. Grid110 is a new start-up business accelerator in partnership with the Office of the Los Angeles Mayor. My topic was putting a new face on the LA apparel industry using data science methodologies. My analysis used data sets from the Los Angeles Open Data repository. I’m a big proponent of government open data resources with the goal of improving the lives of citizens in ever more data-driven cities.

My presentation is provide below. Check out the data visualizations especially the geospatial data analysis clusters showing business starts for the past 10 years across the various industry codes that constitute the LA apparel industry. Moving forward, I will be collaborating with Grid110 in 2016 to publish a new Fashion Tech industry report, develop a new Shiny app, and collect data points for a new Fashion Tech sector database. Exciting stuff!

 

insideBIGDATA Guide to Retail

I’d like to announce the availability of a new technology guide that I was contracted to research, develop and write — “insideBIGDATA Guide to Retail” sponsored by Dell and Intel. This guide is directed toward line of business leaders in conjunction with enterprise technologists with a focus on the above opportunities for retailers and how Dell can help them get started. The guide also will serve as a resource for retailers that are farther along the big data path and have more advanced technology requirements.

I was excited about writing this guide since I spend a lot of my time as a practicing data scientist in the fashion industry where I build machine learning solutions to enhance brand awareness.

You can download a copy of the guide HERE.

My New Book! Machine Learning and Data Science

I’m very proud (and relieved) to announce that my year-long+ book project is finally done! “Machine Learning and Data Science: An Introduction to Statistical Learning Methods with R” is available from Technics Publications. The book provides an introduction to the entire data science process, highlighting the ways that machine learning can be used to solve business problems. Both supervised and unsupervised statistical learning techniques are included. The R statistical programming language is used throughout. Here is the table of contents:

Introduction

Chapter 1: Machine Learning Overview

Chapter 2: Data Access

Chapter 3: Data Munging

Chapter 4: Exploratory Data Analysis

Chapter 5: Regression

Chapter 6: Classification

Chapter 7: Evaluating Model Performance

Chapter 8: Unsupervised Learning

The book is perfect for newbies just entering the data science field who wish to quickly get up to speed with the technology. I plan to use the book for the introductory courses I teach for corporations and universities. You can pre-order the book on Amazon HERE. You can find all the R code used in the book at this GitHub repo.

 

Hadoop Summit 2015

I am pleased to report that I will be attending the upcoming Hadoop Summit 2015 in San Jose on June 9-11. I’ll be the guest of Hortonworks (host of the show and one of the leading Hadoop distributions) and will be covering the conference for insideBIGDATA. Check out insideBIGDATA’s new Hadoop 101 learning channel where I shall publish many of the new presentations I find at the Hadoop Summit.

Corporate R Training at Toyota

I just completed a short Boot-Camp style corporate training gig for Toyota Financial Services. The 3 full-day session was organized by UC Irvine Extension as part of their Data Science program. I had a blast with the Toyota group consisting of Big Data and BI managers, analysts, IT personnel, and programmers. It was a very insightful group with a sincere desire to learn R, data science and machine learning. I came away quite impressed with Toyota (too bad they’re moving to Texas).