Data Driven NYC #20

[Logistical note from our venue host: Please use the 731 Lexington Ave entrance tomorrow, as the courtyard entrance will be closed for an event]

Another great lineup of speakers this month: Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir, and some of the very best data scientists in New York and beyond: Hilary Mason (Accel), Blake Shaw (Foursquare) and Gilad Lotan (Betaworks), with possibly one more to be announced.

Joe Lonsdale, Partner, Formation 8. Prior to starting venture capital firm Formation 8, Joe Lonsdale co-founded Palantir Technologies, a multi-billion dollar software company which develops mission-critical analysis systems used by government and financial organizations around the world. He is also the founder of Addepar, a leader in private wealth management technology. Previously, he worked with the financial arm of PayPal while still a student, and then joined as an early executive at Clarium Capital, and was a key player in growing Clarium into a $5-billion AUM global macro hedge fund.

Hilary Mason, Data Scientist in Residence, Accel. Prior to joining Accel, Hilary was the Chief Scientist at bit.ly, where she found sense in vast data sets. Her work involved both pure research and development of product-focused features. She's also a co-founder of HackNY, a non-profit organization that connects talented student hackers from around the world with startups in NYC. Hilary runs the data science blog Dataists and is a member of hacker collective NYC Resistor. She has discovered two new species, loves to bake cookies, and asks way too many questions.

Gilad Lotan, Chief Data Scientist, betaworks. Gilad is the chief data scientist at betaworks, where he utilizes data driven approaches to draw insight and understanding from social streams. Previously, Gilad served as the VP of R&D at SocialFlow, and built social data visualizations at Microsoft’s FUSE labs.

Blake Shaw, Data Scientist, Foursquare. Blake is a data scientist at Foursquare applying machine learning techniques to large spatiotemporal datasets. Previously he was a research scientist at Sense Networks. He holds a PhD in computer science, machine learning, from Columbia University.

Adam Laiacano, Data Scientist, Tumblr. Adam is a Data Scientist and Engineer at Tumblr, a blogging network with over 145 million blogs, where he's responsible for collecting and analyzing large volumes of data to gain a better understanding of trends and activity within the Tumblr community. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University, and designed signal detection systems for low-power atomic clocks before joining Tumblr.