Data Streaming Panel Event

Our panel will discuss the recent changes in data streaming and new / exciting streaming technologies that specifically relate to Chicago. They'll explore why data streaming is so crucial in today’s large scale data environments, streaming tools, and systems pros and cons and why companies are using the ones that they are (Spark, Akka, Kafka, etc).

Moderator

Lorena Mesa (http://linkedin.com/in/lorenamesa) is a political analyst turned coder, Lorena Mesa is a Sprout Social software engineer in data science, Director on the Python Software Foundation, PyLadies Chicago (https://www.meetup.com/Chicago-PyLadies/) co-organizer, and Tech Ladies Chicago city organizer. Lorena loves to make meaning out of data, asking big questions and using her code to build models to derive that meaning. Part Star Wars fanatic but mostly a Trekkie, Lorena abides by the motto to "live long and prosper".

Panelists

Slim Baltagi (https://www.linkedin.com/in/slimbaltagi/) is currently leading the Big Data practice at Advanced Analytics LLC, a consulting firm highly specialized in helping organizations derive actionable insights into emerging trends and behaviors from large volumes of complex data sets to refine how they engage with customers, employees and partners.

He is an IT leader with extensive Big Data and Fast Data experience as Director/Architect/Engineer/Evangelist delivering end-to-end Big Data/Fast Data projects from solution architecture to production in many verticals.

He is a Big Data thought leader, a speaker at many Big Data conferences and meetups with top presentations on http://slideshare.net when searching for Spark, Hadoop, Kafka or Flink and an organizer of many Big Data/Fast Data meetups at major US cities and abroad.

Dean Wampler (http://linkedin.com/in/deanwampler), Ph.D. (@deanwampler (https://twitter.com/deanwampler)), is Vice President of Fast Data Engineering at Lightbend (http://lightbend.com). He leads the development of Lightbend Fast Data Platform (https://lightbend.com/fast-data-platform), a streaming data and microservices platform built on Spark (http://spark.apache.org), Flink (http://flink.apache.org), Kafka (http://kafka.apache.org), the Lightbend Reactive Platform (https://www.lightbend.com/platform), Mesosophere DC/OS (https://mesosphere.com/), and other tools. He is the author of several books and reports for O'Reilly: Fast Data Architectures for Streaming Applications (http://bit.ly/lightbend-fast-data), Programming Scala, 2nd Edition (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920033073.do), Functional Programming for Java Developers (http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781449311032/), and the coauthor of Programming Hive (http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920023555.do). Dean is a contributor to several open-source projects, a frequent conference speaker, and the co-organizer of several industry conferences and Chicago-based user groups.

Annette Memishofski (http://linkedin.com/in/annette-memishofski) is a Principal at Aptitive (http://www.aptitive.com/), a Chicago based consulting firm. Annette is Aptitive’s Application Development Practice lead, manages Aptitive’s Microsoft Azure partnership, and has over twenty five years of consulting experience. Annette specializes in the delivery and architecture of cloud based applications meeting the unique needs of Aptitive's clients. Aptitive works with customers to leverage the latest cloud technologies to help companies develop world class applications.

CJ Woolard (http://linkedin.com/in/cjwoolard) is currently a Senior Principal Engineer at Uptake Technologies (https://uptake.com/), a Chicago based startup specializing in providing predictive analytics for heavy industry. He is a big data enthusiast and seasoned practitioner, with experience building and supporting distributed systems and streaming platforms in industries ranging from government to legal and e-commerce. During his most recent tenure at Uptake his primary focus has been on assisting with the design and development of their streaming data platform, supporting the ingestion, stream processing (including the application of streaming data science models, machine learning and anomaly detection algorithms), and persistence of data from thousands of disparate data sources across their clients' globally distributed network.

Tony Belkin (http://linkedin.com/in/tbelkin) is head of Engineering for Open Location Platform at HERE (https://here.com/en). HERE is a leader in navigation, mapping and location experiences. They build high-definition (HD) maps and combine them with cloud technology to help autonomous cars, consumers and businesses navigate a complex world with personalized solutions. Belkin builds a platform for internal developers and 3rd parties to create big data batch and stream processing engines to provide location services and other dynamic content to connected cars, enterprises and consumers. Prior to his work at HERE, Belkin worked at WMS Gaming as the chief technology officer and vice president of engineering. He was responsible for HW and SW platform development, architecture, system engineering, product testing and field support for casino gaming machines. Belkin has also worked at Hospira, Xilinx, Ingrid, Motorola and Bell Labs. Belkin graduated with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also holds his M.B.A. from Northwestern University and MSEE from Illinois Institute of Technology.

Beverage Partner

Metis ( http://thisismetis.com ) accelerates careers in data science by providing full-time immersive bootcamps, evening part-time professional development courses, online resources, and corporate programs based in Seattle, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Brought to you by Kaplan, Metis focuses primarily on Python, machine learning, data visualization, deep learning, big data processing, statistical foundations, and more. Students and alumni of the bootcamp program receive continuous support from our career advisors, empowering them to pursue a successful career in the fast-growing field of data science.