Databricks, Overstock, Front Analytics @ Overstock

Hi Everyone,

Scott Ryan from Databricks will also present Wednesday night! Chris Robison from Overstock and James Blair from Front Analytics will both be speaking as well!

See you there!

Bio:

Scott Ryan's bio and synopsis coming soon.

Bio:

Chris Robison is a lead data scientist at Overstock. He graduated from the University of Utah with Masters degrees in Statistics and Computer Science. He works leading small to medium data science teams in ML implementations and automation. He prefers programing in Scala andSpark, but is comfortable in R, Python, and Java as well. In his free time he enjoys playing tennis and skiing. He has undergraduate degrees in Statistics and English Literature from theUniversity of Utah.

Synopsis:

Managing Data Science toward Delivery of Business Value –The advent of modern cloud computing has allowed large scale data processing that was both cost-prohibitive and essentially unimaginable outside of government agencies and large tech conglomerates even five years ago. We can now answer questions by spinning up large numbers of nodes under a pay-as- you-play model with relative ease and from the comfort of our couches. However, combining this new technological capability with the right mix of data scientists, engineers, and product managers to drive direct business value proves exceedingly difficult. Through strong communication with business owners and an iterative approach to modeling and improvement, data science teams can add monotonically increasing value to their business owners throughout the entire process of bringing a model or methodology to completion. Come learn about managing effective agile data science teams that can continually

add value to and work in lock step with their business partners.

We'll have a speaker from Overstock with a bio and synopsis coming soon!

We'll also have James Blair speak!

James Blair
James Blair is a data scientist at Front Analytics and a Masters Student at the University of the Pacific. He predominantly works in R for data analysis/munging and uses h2o for machine learning. James enjoys finding elegant solutions to data problems using R. In his free time he can be found reading up on new R packages, playing racquetball, or spending time with his wife and two kids. He has an undergraduate degree in statistics from BYU.

The One with the Scraping

Come learn how to use R to ethically and efficiently scrape data from the web.

Today nearly any piece of data imaginable is available somewhere online. While some companies expose data as an API endpoint, others simply leave the data out there in the Wild Wild (HTML) West. This meetup will focus on using the rvest package to scrape the scripts from all Friends episodes. Along the way we’ll learn how to use the tidyverse to make code clean and efficient and we’ll use test that to evaluate the quality of user defined parsing functions. Introductory R knowledge helpful but not necessary.

Requirements:

Hardware: A personal laptop

Software: R, RStudio