Lightning Talks - Feb. 2016 Edition

Join us for a series of short, fun and interesting lightning talks about R and Python. Thank you so much for the folks at CHIEF (http://www.agencychief.com/) for hosting us.

Chief is one block away from Dupont Circle on Mass Ave. Please RSVP if you are attending for estimating food and for access: we need to provide an attendee list to building security. There is parking in the building at a reduced rate using Spothero (http://www.spothero.com) or Parking Panda (http://www.parkingpanda.com) ($7).

6:30 - 7:00 Eat, drink and mingle
7:00 - 7:15 Intros & Announcements
7:15 - 8:30ish Talks
Afterwards, off to data drinks.
Note: we need to vacate by 8:45pm

Talks (in no particular order):

Alex Engler: "Setting up an approachable/elastic spark environment" . Alex is a Data Scientist at the Urban Institute, working on big data and modeling for social science and public policy research. He also teaches courses on data science and data visualization at Georgetown University and Johns Hopkins University. http://www.twitter.com/alexcengler http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexcengler

Fatena El-Masri: "Network-based Modeling of Complex Systems, with Applications to Cascading and Contagion Events in Networks". Fatena is a Senior Financial Analyst at FDIC, with many years of experience in financial engineering, applied statistics, and quantitative risk modeling and management (including market, credit and operational risk). For her Computational Science and Informatics PhD dissertation research at GMU, she used Python and agent-based models to study the stability of the banking network and to identify instability conditions for failing banks. https://www.linkedin.com/in/fatena-el-masri-ph-d-7090386

Mike Jadoo: "Geospatial". Mike is economist working in the data production side of the profession for 4 + years. He hosts a Meetup group called Statistical Seminars where he is promoting awareness about different statistical methods and how to create them in R. https://www.meetup.com/Statistical-seminars/ http://economistmike.org/

Mike Messner: "Beyond Open Data: Open Uncertainty?" Mike is a mathematical statistician with the Environmental Protection Agency. A recipient of ASA’s Herriot Award for Innovation in Federal Statistics, he uses R for everything from modeling contaminants in drinking water to carving violins.

Josh Merrell: rChess

Elizabeth Byerly: "Quick PSOCK clusters on AWS and RStudio Server". Elizabeth works as a Data Systems Architect, building systems for computationally intensive analysis at a statistical consulting firm. http://www.twitter.com/ByerlyElizabeth http://www.github.com/ElizabethAB

Nathan Teetor: "Web Frameworks for R". Nate is a software engineer at Morning Consult and an R enthusiast. He enjoys cooking up new R ideas, cooking up new foods, and is searching for the perfect combination of the two. http://www.github.com/nteetor http://www.linkedin.com/in/nteetor http://www.twitter.com/ntweetor

David Kretch: "Multilevel Models". David is a data scientist at Summit Consulting where he works on statistical modeling and machine learning projects. His statistical computing environment of choice is R, but he is attempting to acquire a taste for other languages. https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidkretch https://twitter.com/davidkretch https://github.com/davidkretch