DSfS Community Night!

We are excited to partner with General Assembly for this meetup! Due to their site access requirements, we are NOT managing RSVPs through Meetup. Please RSVP directly via GA at the following link: https://generalassemb.ly/education/data-science-for-sustainability/san-francisco/55631

Doors open at 6:30PM
Talks start at 7pm

For our second annual community night, we will be hearing shorter talks from a few speakers from our own community!

Talk 1: Sam Penrose helps his colleagues at Stem, Inc. shape the data streaming from batteries into "virtual power plants" that provide energy services to utilities. Previously he worked with big distributed data at Mozilla and at Industrial Light & Magic.

Sam's talk: How should businesses work with data? The Internet has answers! Hundreds of challenging online courses, thousands of profound reports, and ... many exuberant Medium posts offer insights in such profusion as to constitute a big data problem of their own. We will not solve it. Bypassing the challenging, the profound, and the exuberant in favor of the practical, we'll review a simple model for data analysis and its sub-tasks data science and data engineering. We'll consider how they fit together in principle, why competently run organizations can have a hard time fitting them together in practice, and how to make data serve, rather than "drive", decisions.

Talk 2: John Romankiewicz has been an energy analyst for over 10 years and has master's degrees in energy and public policy from UC Berkeley. He is now at the Sierra Club Beyond Coal campaign working an equitable transition form coal to clean energy across the U.S. by 2030. He will be talking about two tools which track how electricity is generated physically by state and where it is consumed contractually by utility.

Talk 3: Carson Moore is a software engineer and resident machine learning expert at OhmConnect, using the power of data and automation to aggregate residential demand response for California's investor-owned utilities.  Prior to OhmConnect, he spent five years trading energy futures at a quantitative trading firm in DC before moving to the Bay Area as a data scientist and business analyst at LinkedIn. Carson graduated from Duke University with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. In his talk, Carson will provide a brief overview of what OhmConnect does and will discuss how we're using data to predict user behavior and maximize the potential of their user base.