Where I express personal thoughts in words
Dzejla Medjedovic earned her Ph.D. in the Applied Algorithms Lab of the Computer Science department at Stony Brook University in 2014. Dzejla has worked on a number of projects in algorithms for massive data, taught algorithms at various levels, and spent some time at Microsoft. Dzejla is passionate about teaching, promoting computer science education and technology transfer. She now works as an assistant professor of Computer Science at the International University of Sarajevo.
Last week, I attended DataOps Unleashed, a great event that examines the emergence of DataOps, CloudOps, AIOps, and other professionals coming together to aggregate conversations around the latest trends and best practices for running, managing, and monitoring data pipelines.
This long-form blog recap dissects content from the session talks that I found most useful from attending the summit. These talks are from DataOps professionals at leading organizations detailing how they establish data predictability, increase reliability, and create economic efficiencies with their data pipelines.
Willem Pienaar is the Engineering Lead at Tecton and the creator of Feast, a feature store for machine learning. Feast is an open-source project that Willem developed while leading the machine learning platform team at Gojek, the Indonesian ride-hailing startup. In a previous life, Willem founded and sold a networking startup and worked on industrial data systems.
Jim Dowling is the CEO of Logical Clocks AB, an Associate Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and a Senior Researcher at SICS RISE in Stockholm. His research concentrates on building systems support for machine learning at scale. He is the lead architect of Hops Hadoop, the world's fastest and most scalable Hadoop distribution and only Hadoop platform with support for GPUs as a resource. He is also a regular speaker at Big Data and AI industry conferences.
Pier Paolo Ippolito is a SAS Data Scientist and MSc in Artificial Intelligence graduate from the University of Southampton. He has a strong interest in AI advancements and machine learning applications (such as finance and medicine). Outside of his work activities, he is a writer for Towards Data Science and Freelancer.
At the end of January, I attended REWORK’s Deep Learning 2.0 Virtual Summit, which brings together the latest technological advancements and practical examples to apply deep learning to solve challenges in business and society. In this long-form blog recap, I will dissect content from the talks that I found most useful from attending the summit. The post consists of 17 talks that are divided into 5 sections: Enterprise AI, Ethics and Social Responsibility, Deep Learning Landscape, Generative Models, and Reinforcement Learning.
Alba Cervera-Lierta is a postdoctoral researcher at the Alán Aspuru-Guzik group at the University of Toronto. She obtained her Ph.D. at the University of Barcelona in 2019. Her background is in particle physics and quantum information theory. She has focused on quantum computation algorithms in the last years, particularly those suited for noisy-intermediate scale quantum computation.
Jean-Yves (or "J-Y") Stephan is the CEO & Co-Founder of Data Mechanics, a Y-Combinator-backed startup building a data engineering platform that makes Apache Spark more developer-friendly and more cost-effective. Before Data Mechanics, he was a software engineer at Databricks, the unified analytics platform created by Apache Spark's founders. JY did his undergraduate studies in Computer Science & Applied Math at Ecole Polytechnique (Paris, France) before pursuing a Masters at Stanford in Management Science & Engineering.
Chris Mattmann is the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at NASA JPL. He is also JPL's first Principal Scientist in the area of Data Science. He has over 19 years of experience at JPL and has conceived, realized, and delivered the architecture for the next generation of reusable science data processing systems for NASA's space and earth science missions.
He contributes to open source and was a former Director at the Apache Software Foundation (2013-18).
Finally, he is the Director of the Information Retrieval & Data Science (IRDS) group at USC and Adjunct Associate Professor.
