"Everything Data" Launch: Exploring data engineering

6:30 Introduction with Brian Odgers

6:35 - 6:55 Stephen Webb O'Kane and Ryan Perry

Data Ingestion without the Indigestion.
In which we’ll talk about our journey of building and maintaining a data lake for Marketing Touch-point analysis.

6:55 - 7:15 Break: Food provided

7:15- 8:00 Graham Whiteside, Jonathan Maxwell and Ryan McKeown

Viewing Data Streaming through a Different Lens
What if calling a call center didn’t have to be such a frustrating experience? Whether you hung up in anger after getting lost in a maze of automated prompts, or your signal drops just when you’d been connected to the right person to service your call, imagine if we could use this information to route your follow-up phone call more effectively?
See how traditional real-time streaming frameworks compare to Apache Kafka in finding a solution to this problem, and learn how to use Landoop Lenses to simplify this, and other, data engineering tasks by applying SQL to this modern data-in-motion platform.

8- 8:30 Networking

Bios

Brian Odgers:
At Arity, Brian manages a team creating a big data telematics platform. This combines fast paced customer focused agile methodologies with open sources cloud applications.

Previously Brian has worked for both start-ups and large corporations. During this time, he gained a number of patents, he is a Chartered Engineer and was part of team who won a British Computer Society’s Gold Medal.

Brian regularly takes part in charity activities including helping redecorate a local bereavement counselling office.

Steve Webb-O’Kane:
Steve leads a number of Research and Analytics teams at Allstate NI, mainly in the Marketing area. He enjoys the challenge of bringing stories out of data and passing on his knowledge and experience. Steve previously worked in the City of London building data and processing solutions for a number of organisations. In his spare time, he brews his own beer and cider.

Ryan Perry:
Ryan is a Data Engineer who works in the Marketing Analytics Data Engineering Team. As a Data Engineer he designs solutions for efficient ETL and analysis of marketing optimization projects.
Previously Ryan worked on system data migrations and upgrades of data visualization systems for government based contracts.

In his spare time Ryan enjoys collecting and building guitars with his first model being built last year.

Ryan McKeown:
Ryan is passionate about exploring interesting technology and applying mathematics to find new solutions to complex business problems. He has been doing both for 2 years as a data analytic engineer in D3, helping implement machine learning to inform marketing strategies.

In his spare time, Ryan enjoys woodworking, playing tennis, and going for walks to explore the outdoors.

Graham Whiteside:
Graham has worked at Allstate for 9 (long, long) years.
He started with the company as a Unix administrator and later worked with ISG on Integrated Customer Services, Environment Architecture and later Hadoop administration.

Graham founded the ISG real time analytics team around a year ago and has since spearheaded the adoption of Kafka and Stream Processing technology at Allstate, building up an international team of 9 engineers.

Jonathan Maxwell:
Prior to Joining Allstate Jonathan worked for one of UK’s largest retailers and was involved in integrating their loyalty card scheme software into their Northern Ireland stores for the first time. He also worked for a business services company and was part of the team who set up a major broadcaster’s customer call center in Belfast.

Outside of work Jonathan keeps himself busy as the coach of a women’s football team.