Who is a good data scientist?

What is data science? What are the different roles of a data scientist? What is the importance of prototyping and production level code?

What are good practices by companies to empower women in data science? How do female data scientists lean in to make a mark before the definition of the field sets in? How do we contribute to defining data science?

Our panelists are:

Vivienne Ming: She is a scientist entrepreneur and the chief Data Scientist at Gild.

Shanshan Ding: Data Scientist at Tagged.

Deborah Donato: Principal Data Scientist at StumbleUpon

There will be lightning talks for the first half hour.

(1)PersonalHealthCloud.com

Working on launching a private Beta of my startup, PersonalHealthCloud.com in the next 2-4 weeks. It will collect and store health-related user data.

Lydia Sugarman

(2) Title
Preserving lives with phones: predicting manic/depressive episodes in bipolar sufferers

Abstract
Bipolar disorder destroys lives and robs economic potential ($70 billion/year globally), but research has show that it is possible to predict the onset of some manic/depressive episodes before they become disruptive. Would it be possible to make the same predictions with nothing but a phone? Collaborating with an emerging emotion tracking platform for Android, I'm exploring how early it can identify the symptoms of an episode.

Vivienne Ming.

(3) United Way is a non-profit in SF who’s trying to cut Bay Area poverty in half by 2020. To support these efforts, I have created four ideas that would help us do so utilizing and sourcing in “Big Data”. Specifically, creating market segmentations to target current and prospective donors/advocates; using API’s to understand target population behaviors; using existing demographic data from Big Data sources (e.g- ESRI) to create a real-time picture of current demographics (and understand needs/gaps) and finally using foundation data sources to create a landscape of impact of other existing efforts. Is this plausible? What are the greatest challenges? Which might be the lowest hanging fruit? Other opportunities?

India Swearingen

(4)Intro to big data / hadoop

Why would I want to use these tools for my dataset? When is it overkill?What's MapReduce?What are good tools to get started with?

by Nimbus Goehausen

(5) Data Science: The job interview process.

I have been interviewing for jobs over the past few months. I will share some of my technical experiences of the process.

Sanghamitra Deb.

If these or similar questions are interesting to you come join us at our very first meetup.