We are excited to kick off our fall season of meetups with two great speakers to discuss relevant applications of the effective use of data. Sanford Hess, IT Director for the City of Urbana, will be presenting on using data to improve an ineffective software solution. Then we'll hear from Tim Olson, Data Scientist at Verizon Media, who will be presenting on diagnosing dubious data in the area of Connected TV advertising traffic for fraud detection. We'll be hosting the meetup online via Zoom. Please RSVP for the event at the CU-DSUG Meetup Page.

More details on the speakers and their presentations:

Sanford Hess

Bio: Sanford Hess is Urbana's IT Director, and believes strongly that making computer systems adapt to their users is the only way to get people to successfully use them.
Title: Using Data to Improve an Ineffective Software Solution
Abstract: Urbana's Public Works Department had an ineffective Work Management system. Hear how the City used data from the system to diagnose issues with usability and improve data collection.

Tim Olson

Bio: Tim is a data scientist in the Traffic Protection Science team as part of Verizon Media's data organization in Champaign, IL.
Title: Diagnosing Dubious Data
Abstract: Streaming video on connected TV (CTV) devices is a rapidly growing industry, and digital advertising in this space is ballooning. Unfortunately, so is digital ad fraud. We use a number of techniques to detect and prevent fraud, including ML models, but data quality has been a major issue for CTV traffic. I'll talk about some of these challenges and the data science lessons to keep in mind when working with data of dubious quality.