"Sparkling Visualizations" - a panel discussion on data viz solutions + Spark

IMPORTANT REGISTRATION INFO:

ALL VISITORS TO 1110 VERMONT MUST BE PRE-REGISTERED W/SECURITY SO PLEASE RSVP W/YOUR FIRST & LAST NAME AND BRING A PHOTO ID FOR CHECK-IN. YOU MUST ARRIVE BY 6:30 TO GAIN ENTRY.

OVERVIEW:

Come join us for the first DC Spark Meetup in the 2015 New Year! Back by popular demand, we'll be holding a panel discussing format with top data visualization solutions to discuss their capabilities & integration with Spark. Confirmed Panelist include: Tableau, Zoomdata, Platfora, and D3 (represented by a Data Scientist from Cap One Labs). Comcast will be our hosts and serving as our moderator.

We'll network and have food from 6 - 6:30 and then start the panel from there.

SPEAKERS:

Farzad Aref, VP of Product Management at Zoomdata - Passionate about data, Farzad has built his career around disruptive technologies that enables humans to make sense from data, no matter what size or format. He is Head of Product at Zoomdata, where he's responsible for the overall product’s strategy, roadmap, UX, design, and quality. Zoomdata is a venture backed local emerging technology company changing the way people see and interact with Big Data.

Paul Lilford, Global Director of Technology Partners at Tableau Software - Paul is the Global Director for Technology Partners at Tableau. Paul is responsible for cultivating and growing Tableau's Technology Partners. Paul has over 20 years of experience in EPM, BI, data warehousing, OLAP, and analytics. Prior to Tableau, Paul was a Director of EPM and BI at UnitedHealthcare developing a technical team in Finance for delivering analytic solutions across the enterprise supporting thousands of business users and optimizing the use of technology. Prior to UnitedHealth care, Paul spent 11 years at Hyperion Solutions where he held a variety of positions from consulting to supporting strategic customers and developing strategic partners, including HP, Teradata, Unisys, SPSS, IBM, & Showcase. Paul holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Business Administration, with concentrations on Entrepreneurship and MIS from Northeastern University, Boston.

Ben Laird, Data Scientist at Cap One Labs (and D3 + Spark innovator) - Ben works on a team of data scientists, engineers, statisticians and product managers to help rethink how the financial industry does business. He works daily with Hadoop and Apache Spark to leverage large data sets and machine learning methods for various problems in Capital One's credit card and bank businesses. He also is excited about building new analysis tools and visualizations with Python, Scala, and Javascript for other analysts in the company. Most recently he has been working on solutions for visualizing real time streams of transactions, using Spark and D3.js. Ben joined Capital One Labs after spending 5 years in the defense industry, where he was a "jack of all trades" data engineer, working on problems ranging from space debris tracking to natural language processing. Ben holds a BS in Operations Research from Cornell University and an MS in Applied Math from Johns Hopkins.

Keith McClellan, Director of Solutions Engineering & Technical Director, Federal Programs at Platfora - Keith specializes in Big Data technologies, having filled customer-facing roles at companies like Netezza (now IBM) and EMC Greenplum (now Pivotal). He currently focuses on bringing Platfora (on top of Hadoop, leveraging both MapReduce and Spark) to customers to help them shorten the time it takes for analysts to glean insights from Big Data. At Platfora ( http://www.platfora.com ), we think that Big Data should be more than just a tool that’s leveraged by the best and brightest in your organization, and we provide a solution for analysts to explore Big Data without the heavy-handed approach that’s grown up in data-driven organizations for the past two decades. Platfora exposes the full power of Spark’s programming model and ecosystem, by allowing data scientists to build and publish Advanced Analytic Extensions within an industry-proven architecture that lets business analysts make sense of multi-structured data without having to learn to code.

PARKING & METRO

In addition to street parking (metered during the day but no time limit after 6pm) there are several parking garages near-by…including one in/under the Comcast building (see info below). Comcast is also an easy walk from 2 metro stations.

McPherson Square is 0.2 miles from the office (Blue/Orange/Silver lines): http://goo.gl/maps/PIdmB

Farragut North is 0.4 miles from the office (Red line): https://goo.gl/maps/tqi5m

1110 Garage Hours of Operation

7:00 AM to 1:00 AM

Garage Rates

Hourly: $12.00

Daily: $18.00