UC Berkeley Holds DataLead Conference

The former chief scientist at Amazon, a data scientist at Walmart Labs, a quantitative analyst at Google and a data strategist at Morgan Stanley are among the experts who will share insights at the DataLead conference at UC Berkeley September 30 through October 2, 2014. The inaugural conference, which draws from an array of speakers from Berkeley-Haas, Silicon Valley, Wall Street banks, Europe’s Big Data leaders, the U.S. Department of Defense and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, will take place at the Clark Kerr Campus Conference Center in Berkeley.

The three-day event promises to take a deep dive on big data, with an emphasis on the growing importance of analyzing and using large data sets to create business opportunities in marketing, finance and retail.

The Master of Financial Engineering (MFE) program at Haas is co-sponsoring the conference with French university ENSAE ParisTech. Haas faculty are among the presenters and discussants. Nancy Wallace, professor and chair of the Real Estate Group at Haas, will participate in a panel on “Big Data Usage in Mortgage Modeling” on day one. On the second day, Miguel Villas-Boas, professor of marketing strategy, and Minjung Park, assistant marketing professor, will participate in the panel on “Marketing in the Era of Big Data.”

Andreas Weigend, UC Berkeley lecturer and former chief scientist at Amazon, will deliver the keynote to kick off the event. Weigend is the author of over 100 scientific papers on the application of machine learning techniques to solve finance and business problems.

The first day focuses on banking, mortgage modeling and understanding big data used in financial trading, including a seminar on machine learning with two hours of hands-on teaching. Day two emphasizes how big data is transforming marketing.

The final day will focus on big data’s use in education, travel, and social networking with talks on matching job offers to social network users and using big data to personalize travel. Recruiting opportunities are expected to be a key part of the conference, according to Kreitzman, who says a steady stream of companies are contacting her to inquire about students with data science skills.

regions: San Francisco

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