Top 5 Data Science Talks hosted at DSS

By Data Science Salon

Over the past 5 years, Data Science Salon has become one of the most active and diverse communities for data scientists to gather, exchange their knowledge and open interesting discussions among peers. Over 200 talks have been presented at the DSS events throughout these years, providing a lot of insightful information about AI and machine learning applications for different industries.

In celebration of our 5th year anniversary, we would like to release and share with you some of the most popular presentations held at a Data Science Salon event.

Make sure to join the Data Science Salon Community Network and check out the DSS Insider section, which gives you access to all presentations from previous DSS events, as part of a monthly subscription!

Time Series Analysis with Pandas

DSS Miami 2019 - Presented by Joshua Malina, former Data Scientist at American Express

One of the presentations that generated a lot of interest by the DSS community was the presentation by Joshua Malina, former Data Scientist at American Express, held at the DSS Miami in 2019. In his talk, Joshua explains how American Express utilizes Pandas for the analysis and manipulation of big amounts of time series data in an easy, flexible and powerful way. If the data obtained is not satisfying and shows convincing results, he explains how an additional analysis ANOVA (Analysis of Variance) can be applied, which is used to look at the variance across groups compared to variance within groups.

 

Talks about time series forecasting were generally interesting to the DSS audience. Here’s another one that you can find on the DSS Youtube channel, about "Time Series Forecasting in Retail", presented by Jeffrey Yau, Head of Data Science, Store Associate Technology at Walmart Labs.

Deep Learning for Everyone

DSS Elevate Virtual, 2021 - Presented by Gabriela de Queiroz, Chief Data Scientist, AI Strategy and Innovation, at IBM.

Another successful presentation was given by Gabriela de Queiroz, Chief Data Scientist, AI Strategy and Innovation, at IBM and held at the DSS Elevate Virtual in 2021.

During this talk, she explains how, as a Data Scientist (or aspiring Data Scientist), her community is overwhelmed by the amount of knowledge they need to have and acquire. Every day there is a new technique, a new framework, a new state of the art model. For the past few years, deep learning has become a hot topic and it is the main driver of many applications. She also walks the audience through the journey of how to start with deep learning, which of the several deep learning frameworks people should use and where everyone can find examples of code that work and that they can use without worrying about the license.

 

Her presentation shows how everyone who would like to start with deep learning, can do so, without any previous deep learning knowledge, and how they can have a basic ready-to-use deep learning “service” running in less than five minutes.

 

MCL Clustering of Sparse Graphs

DSS Miami 2018 - Presented by Athanassios Kintsakis, Master Software Engineer - Machine Learning, at Capital One

The third presentation that the DSS audience found particularly interesting was held at the DSS Miami in 2018 and was given by Athanassios Kintsakis, Master Software Engineer and Machine Learning, at Capital One.

In his talk, Athanassios explains how the increasing need for clustering in several scientific domains has inevitably driven the creation of innovative algorithms, each designed to perform more efficiently in certain applications. One of the most established algorithms for graph clustering problems is the Markov Cluster Algorithm (MCL).

Athanassios shows how he and his team developed a distributed architecture, able to accommodate large and sparse graphs, to actualize the MCL and R-MCL algorithm. The proposed solution can handle arbitrarily large inputs, provide almost linear speed-up with the addition of computational resources and output results directly comparable to the non-distributed reference MCL implementation.

 

A Sustainable Agenda Using ESG Data to Quantify Company and Portfolio Impact

DSS Miami 2020 - Presented by Moody Hadi, Group Manager - New Product Development & Financial Engineering at S&P Global Market Intelligence & Rochelle March, former Manager, ESG Innovation & Analytics at S&P Global Market Intelligence

Another acclaimed presentation is the one given at the DSS Miami in 2020 by Moody Hadi, Group Manager, New Product Development & Financial Engineering Intelligence and Rochelle March, former Manager, ESG Innovation & Analytics, both from S&P Global Market Intelligence. 

Moody and Rochelle explain how the Trucost SDG EvaluationTool that they built and launched provides measurement of a company’s impact on SDG relevant factors and helps optimize sustainable finance performance.

The second part of the presentation includes a demo on the different ESG components and how companies can use the portfolio scoring tool in the real world.

 

How to Use Data to 10X Marketing & Sales

DSSVirtual 2020 - Presented by Ella Hilal, Director of Data at Shopify

How do you go about improving marketing and sales performance? Use Data. During her interesting presentation, Ella Hilal, Director of Data at Shopify, teaches us how to tap into data to effectively drive better decision-making, strategy and product creation to unlock better marketing and sales.

Customers nowadays face a sea of endless information, noises and voices and/or sometimes the person targeted is not the one that has buying power, leaving marketers without a thorough idea about who their buyer person really is and causing problems for the sales teams as well. 

Data can provide a solution in a world where both marketers and customers are struggling. The problem is, data scientists don’t always know how to help. Ella guides the audience through the 6 steps she created and that data scientists should follow before building any machine solutions.

Watch the complete presentation to know more!

 

The videos released in this post only provide a sneak peek to the full DSS video archive. If you’d like to dive deeper and have full access to all data science talks, make sure to subscribe to the DSS Insider Video Repository on our DSS Community Network!

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