LA West R Users: July Meeting

LA West R Users Group will have our July meeting at WeWork 5792 W Jefferson Blvd in Culver City. We'll have two talks followed by 30min of mingling time. NOTE: this event starts earlier than usual. The first talk starts at 6:45 pm.

**Talk1** (20min talk, 10min Q&A)
Title: useR 2019 Recap

Amy will share her experience at useR 2019 in Toulouse, France (http://www.user2019.fr). She will focus on only the talks she attended.

**About Talk1 Speaker**
Amy Tzu-Yu Chen
Organizer, LA R Users Group
Follow her relatively quiet Twitter: https://twitter.com/amy17519

**Talk2**
Title: Better Name Matching via Machine Learning

Description:
Have you ever come across typos, misspellings, nicknames, and other oddities in personnel data files? Have you ever tried to compare names to determine if names were the same or different from each other? Have you ever thought that maybe, just maybe there was a better way? This talk focuses on how a supervised Machine Learning process that uses various string distance algorithms as features can predict whether or not a name matches or does not match better than traditional methods.

**About Talk2 Speaker * 2 **
1) Jeremy Guinta, Data Scientist; Litigation Consultant; Statistical Expert; Machine Learning; Lecturer

Jeremy has nearly 20 years’ experience in litigation consulting and complex data analysis. He specializes in performing complex data analysis, including complex statistical procedures to develop trends and predictive analysis. He also retains an expertise in machine learning and has developed machine learning processing to improve name matching and categorical descriptions of textual data. Over the course of his nearly 20-year career, Jeremy has developed and delivered training courses on Statistics, Data Management and Analysis, R programming, SQL programming, and Data Visualization. Jeremy has authored articles on data privacy, data management, statistical analysis, and general areas of law when law, statistics, and data analysis intersect. Jeremy also teaches a college level course in beginning and intermediate statistics.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyguinta/
Github: https://github.com/jjghockey

2) Nellie Ponarul, Associate at Ankura Consulting

Nellie is a recent UCLA grad working in litigation consulting. She specializes in large scale data analysis primarily in R and SQL. She has experience working on large class action matters and small commercial disputes. She’s always looking to pick up new tricks in R and is looking forward to meeting everyone in the LA R Users Group!

**Timeline**
– 6:00pm open door (There will be pizzas and coke)
– 6:40pm intro from LA West R User Group
– 6:45pm Talk1
– 7:15pm Talk2
– 7:45pm mingle time
– 8:00pm event ends
Code of Conduct: https://github.com/laRusers/codeofconduct

**Venue**
Address: WeWork, 5792 Jefferson Los Angeles CA 90016

When you arrive: Bring a photo ID and scan it at the guest registration tablets at the front desk for the Meetup event. If your photo ID does not successfully scan, check in at the tablet as a guest of "Meetup Event".

Direction:
Expo Line LaCienega/Jefferson stop
Parking: Jefferson Lot (behind building); Day Rate: $2/20 min $6/hour for first 2 hours $18/day

**LA (West) R Users Group**
Email: larusers@gmail.com
Invite yourself to our Slack group: http://bit.ly/laerug
Follow us on Twitter: @la_Rusers
Check out more events: laocr.org/

We are working on building a network for all useRs in SoCal. Come be our guest! Come be our speaker!