KDD 2016 Speakers

Panelist: Ingo Mierswa, Founder and President, RapidMiner

Dr. Ingo Mierswa is the founder and CTO of RapidMiner and as such responsible for the strategic innovation of the open source machine learning platform. Ingo is an industry-veteran data scientist since starting to develop RapidMiner at the Artificial Intelligence Division of the TU Dortmund University in Germany. Ingo, the scientist, has authored numerous award-winning publications about predictive analytics and big data. Ingo, the entrepreneur, has been leading the company with growth rates of up to 300 percent per year over the first seven years. In 2012, he spearheaded the go-international strategy with the opening of offices in the U.S. as well as the UK and Hungary. After two rounds of fundraising, the acquisition of Radoop, and supporting the positioning of RapidMiner with leading analyst firms like Gartner and Forrester, Ingo takes a lot of pride in bringing the world’s best team to RapidMiner.

Panelist: Richard Rovner, Vice President of Marketing, MathWorks

Richard Rovner is Vice President of Marketing for MathWorks, the makers of MATLAB & Simulink. He leads the company’s 300-person marketing department and is responsible for strategic planning, product and technology strategy, partner management, web and programs marketing, and corporate communications. In this role, Richard has the opportunity to see how MATLAB and Simulink users advance the state-of-the-art in numerous applications and industries. Before joining MathWorks in 2001, Richard held senior marketing and sales positions at SAS. Rich spent the first part of his career as what is now called a data scientist, working for ten years developing applications in computer vision and image processing, machine learning, simulation, and statistical analysis. He has a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.S. in Computer Science from George Washington University.

Panelist: Udo Sglavo, Senior Director R & D, SAS

Udo Sglavo is a senior director of the data mining and forecasting R&D teams at SAS. He has the privilege to head up a team of highly skilled statisticians, data scientists, and mid-tier developers. Jointly they are in charge of creating industry-leading and award-winning software for data mining, machine learning, and large scale automatic forecasting. In addition he helps to define the specifics of the advanced analytics product portfolio at SAS, as well as the integration of analytics into solutions and visualization products.

Udo enjoys public speaking and talking to customers about how to apply analytics to solve business problems. He is comfortable working in an international environment, having established and run a virtual, global team of analytics domain experts.

Panelist: Dan Steinberg, President and Founder, Salford Systems

Dan Steinberg, President and CEO of Salford Systems, founded the company in 1983 just after receiving his Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard. He also served as a Member of Technical Staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories and Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego, and has participated in dozens of consulting projects for Fortune 100 clients. He has been honored by the SAS User’s Group International (SUGI) and led the modeling teams that won the KDDCup 2000 and the 2002 Duke/Teradata Churn modeling competition. Dr. Steinberg has published articles in statistics, econometrics, computer science, and marketing journals, and has been a featured data mining issues speaker for the American Marketing Association, American Statistical Association, the Direct Marketing Association and the Casualty Actuarial Society.