Blockchain Technologies: Intuitive Tutorial for Data Scientists (feat. JPMorgan)

In order to gain entry, you must RSVP on both meetup AND the GA site here: https://generalassemb.ly/education/blockchain-technologies-an-intuitive-introduction-for-data-scientists/new-york-city/73133

Tentative Schedule:
6:30pm: Pizza + Beer networking
6:45pm: A Notebook Diatribe by Will Nowak, Data Scientist at Dataiku
7:10pm: Blockchain Technologies: An Intuitive Introduction for Data Scientists by Bruno Gonçalves, Senior Data Scientist at JPMorgan Chase

Talk Abstracts:

A Notebook Diatribe by Will Nowak, Data Scientist at Dataiku:
Use of the Jupyter notebook has exploded amongst data scientists of recent - but is it really the best IDE for data science? This (not-quite-) diatribe will explore some of the limitations of the tool, primarily focusing on its effects on working on a production-ready data science environment.

Blockchain Technologies: An Intuitive Introduction for Data Scientists by Bruno Gonçalves, Senior Data Scientist at JPMorgan Chase:
Bitcoin has brought about a true revolution in how we think about money. In one fell stroke it solved the main problems that afflicted previous attempts at a truly digital currency: distributed consensus, double spending, and external attacks. Perhaps more importantly, it provided the first working version of a blockchain or distributed ledger. However, despite their relative simplicity, the underlying concepts on which these technologies are built are not well known and often obscured by hype and technical jargon.

Since the days of Bitcoin’s founding, many other crypto-currencies have been proposed and released. This tutorial will introduce these technologies in an intuitive way for data scientists, explaining their driving algorithms, motivations, and data structures. Recent developments and proposals such as SegWit, Lightning Network and smart contracts will also be covered.

Speaker bios:

Will helps power the data science team at Dataiku, implementing machine learning solutions for clients while also working internally on DSS algorithm development. Prior to Dataiku, Will was a machine learning engineer at Unbox Research. Will has a BA in Mathematics and Economics from Northwestern University, and also received an MA in education administration from Columbia University earlier in his career.

Bruno Gonçalves is currently a Senior Data Scientist while on leave from a tenured faculty position at Aix-Marseille Université. Since completing his PhD in the Physics of Complex Systems in 2008 he has been pursuing the use of Data Science and Machine Learning to study Human Behavior. Using large datasets from Twitter, Wikipedia, web access logs, and Yahoo! Meme he studied how we can observe both large scale and individual human behavior in an obtrusive and widespread manner. The main applications have been to the study of Computational Linguistics, Information Diffusion, Behavioral Change and Epidemic Spreading. He is the author of 60+ publications with over 7300+ Google Scholar citations and an h-index of 30. In 2015 he was awarded the Complex Systems Society's 2015 Junior Scientific Award for "outstanding contributions in Complex Systems Science" and in 2018 was named a Scientific Fellow of the Foundation for Scientific Interchange in Turin, Italy. He is also the editor of the book Social Phenomena: From Data Analysis to Models (Springer, 2015).