Former Obama For America and Living Social Data Scientists Show Off Startups

Welcome Back, DIDC members to a beautiful and warmer 2014. As a few people have mentioned, DIDC has been missing in action for January and February and for that, we must apologize. We had an amazing sequence of events planned for the last two months that fell through last minute. Now, however, we are back on track and are excited to bring you our first event for this year featuring amazing talks from Erek Dyskant of BlueLabs, Brian Muller of OpBandit, and more!

Event Schedule

6:00 - 6:45pm Networking
6:45 - 6:50pm Introduction
6:50 - 8:00pm Speakers

BiosErek Dyskant - is a Co-Founder at BlueLabs, an analytics and technology company dedicated to using data science techniques for improving social good. Prior to BlueLabs, he was the Technology Lead for Geospatial Analytics at Obama for America. Erek finds that many of the best applications of big data processes not only start with huge datasets, but result in large nuanced predictions such as individual-level behavioral likelihoods, hyperlocal climate change predictions, patient-level treatment recommendations, or locations where election-related violence may (or may not) have occurred. He works to expand the role of data driven decisions beyond strategic decisions made in boardrooms to tactical ones made by field organizers, case managers, and community health workers.

Brian Muller - is the Co-Founder and CTO of OpBandit, a company that helps publishers and marketers increase their online engagement with responsive content delivery. Prior to founding OpBandit, he was the Lead Data Scientist at LivingSocial. While at LivingSocial, he founded the data science team and oversaw the creation and growth of a big data infrastructure and the teams necessary to support it - all while the customer base grew from thousands to over 70 million users. Before that, he worked as the Web Director for Foreign Policy Magazine under the Washington Post. Brian has also worked as an adviser and consultant for a variety of groups including PBS, the Carnegie Foundation, and the State of South Carolina. He as a MS in the Biomedical Sciences, and has spent time in academia working for the Medical University of South Carolina and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine focused on squeezing meaningful information out of vast quantities of genomic data.

Mark Stephenson - is Founding Partner of Cardinal Insights, a data targeting, intelligence and modeling firm with offices in Washington, DC and Austin, TX. Cardinal Insights was formed to help all levels of political campaign and corporate entities target, plan and execute their data-driven efforts. Using their over 20+ years of combined partner experience with political and consumer data management, Mark and his Austin-based partners deliver data intelligence to clients and then build and execute modeled data projects for voter and customer targeting.

Previously, Mark managed and directed product development efforts for FLS Connect, an industry-leader in the political technology, data management and telemarketing space. Since starting at FLS Connect and establishing a product development division in 2008, his team built and deployed a number of custom client web and database applications, which were used by national Presidential campaigns, committees, third party groups and dozens of state/local campaign and hundreds of thousands of individual users. Prior to his time at FLS Connect, Mark worked in Boston, MA on Mitt Romney’s 2008 Presidential campaign, managing the campaign’s strategic data and voter contact efforts, and at the Republican National Committee.

A University of Michigan graduate, Mark lives with his wife Ashlee and cocker spaniel Chip in Alexandria, VA and is an avid fly fisher.

Rahul Singh - is a Founding Partner and CEO at Anant Corporations, that helps organizations solve problems with their unstructured information - content and knowledge - in the context of their Enterprise Architecture.

Over the last 15 years Rahul has grown and exited from a hosting company, started and exited from a software practice, and consulted independently and through other firms for companies such as ATT, Merrill Lynch, Aetna, Accenture, USPS, and Feeding America to design, build and scale business critical software and systems.

Over the last few years, Rahul has been working on a book : "The Modern Enterprise : Business of Business Today" where he's interviewed 15 firms that primarily operate their organizations using a concert of online software and cloud infrastructures.

While he consults for his firm's clients, he is working on a knowledge and relationship search product that uses a new approach to rank knowledge to minimize information retrieval and routing needs within education and across the modern enterprise.

Jeremy Snyder - is a serial entrepreneur, having done 5 startups with both success and failure outcomes. In addition, Jeremy formerly led sales for AWS in Southeast Asia. Jeremy co-founded AuditBucket with a veteran of the finance industry. Jeremy now splits his time between AuditBucket and consulting with emerging startups in the sharing economy, cloud computing and big data spaces.