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Speaker Bios

(click on the speaker name or photo to view speaker details)


Mario Michael Krell

University of Bremen
Introduction to the Signal Processing and Classification Environment pySPACE
Mario Michael Krell received his diploma degree in mathematics in 2009 from the Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. Since 2009, he is with the Robotics Lab at the University of Bremen and the Robotics Innovation Center (RIC) of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Bremen. Currently, he is working on improving SVM classification and he is main developer of the signal processing and classification environment pySPACE. His research areas are signal processing, machine learning, brain reading, and appliance of optimization theory. Web page: http://mmkrell.github.io/CV/index.html

Andreas Klostermann

Improving scientific visualizations with Blender
I am a student of veterinary medicine in Hannover, Germany, and currently work as a software developer for python+django.

Andreas Mueller

NYU CDS, scikit-learn
Advanced scikit-learn , Commodity Machine Learning, Commodity Machine Learning, scikit-learn
Andreas Mueller received his PhD in machine learning from the University of Bonn. After working as a machine learning researcher on computer vision applications at Amazon for a year, he recently joined the Center for Data Science at the New York University. In the last four years, he has been maintainer and one of the core contributor of scikit-learn, a machine learning toolkit widely used in industry and academia, and author and contributor to several other widely used machine learning packages. His mission is to create open tools to lower the barrier of entry for machine learning applications, promote reproducible science and democratize the access to high-quality machine learning algorithms.

Andreas Schreiber

German Aerospace Center (DLR), Medando, PyCon DE
Quantified Self: Analyzing the Big Data of our Daily Life
Andreas Schreiber is head of the Department for Distributed Systems and Component Software at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) (DLR at a glance), located in Berlin, Braunschweig and Cologne. His research fields include data analysis, distributed computing, mobile systems, HPC, social networks, and software engineering. He is also an Open Source advocate at DLR. Andreas organizes events for Python, such as the PyCon DE 2013 in Cologne, Germany, or the workshop series Python for High-Performance and Scientific Computing (PyHPC) at the Supercomputing conferences. He co-founded Medando, a startup that develops develops mobile health apps for Android that support personalized medicine, independent living, and self tracking (Quantified Self).

Andy Goldschmidt

Jimdo
ABBY - A Django app to document your A/B tests
After studying physics at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany, I began working as a data scientist at Jimdo in April 2013.

Bence Faludi

Mito Europe Kft.
Extract Transform Load using mETL, Extract Transform Load using mETL
Data warehouse specialist, IT project manager, Python expert. Built databases for Nissan, led IT development Union Insurance, Central European University, Procter & Gamble and Profession.hu. Organizer of the Budapest Database Meetup and creator of the mETL business intelligence tool.

Benedikt Koehler

d.core GmbH
Street Fighting Trend Resarch
Benedikt Koehler studied sociology, anthropology and psychology in Munich, where he received his PhD in 2006. After founding a mobile web (then: WAP) start-up in the late 1990s, he worked as a consultant for various Internet and media companies like Webmiles, ORF or Hubert Burda Media. In 2008 he co-founded the Social Media Association, the first trade association for social media in Germany. 2009, he joined social media intelligence company ethority as head of research and strategy. As ethority’s Chief Operating Officer, he has been responsible for all operative business in Germany and abroad which included strategy consultancy, market research and communication strategies for clients such as Bayer, Telefonica O2, Hansgrohe or ARAG. Right now, he is working as Director Data & Innovation at Munich-based media research agency d.core. In January 2010, he co-wrote the “Slow Media Manifesto” on sustainable media production. The manifesto has sparked a worldwide movement and has been translated in 15 languages. He also wrote statistical analysis tools for various Social Media platforms such as the German brand dashboard Brandtweet and the Twitter statistics tool Brandtweet Statistics (formerly known as TwitterFriends), which has been featured in many publications on Social Media marketing.

Bryan Van De Ven

Continuum Analytics
Beautiful Interactive Visualizations in the Browser with Bokeh, Bokeh, Bokeh, Bokeh - Interactive Visualization for Large Datasets, Bokeh Tutorial, Interactive Plots Using Bokeh, The IPython protocol, frontends and kernels
Mr. Van de Ven received undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from UT Austin, and a Master's degree in physics from UCLA. He has worked at the Applied Research Labs, developing software for sonar feature detection and classification systems on US Naval submarine platforms. He also spent time at Enthought, where he worked on problems in financial risk modeling and fluid mixing simulation, and also contributed to the Chaco visualization library. He has also worked on an assortment of iOS projects as an independent consultant.

Chris Nyland

Wragge Lawrence Graham & Co LLP
Pandas' Thumb: unexpected evolutionary use of a Python library.
Chris is a UK-based tax lawyer and chartered tax adviser with a keen interest in making Python as effective in the world of tax as it already is in the world of finance. His particular interests are in all taxes that impact on real estate, and also in value added tax generally. In his spare time he develops software to assist in the rapid analysis of tax liabilities in property portfolios.

Christian Thurau

The unbelievable Machine Company
Low-rank matrix approximations in Python
Christian Thurau is a data scientist at The unbelievable Machine Company, a big data and cloud service provider located in Berlin. Previously he co-founded the big data startup Game Analytics in Copenhagen. He has a Ph.D. in pattern recognition and has published over 50 papers on a broad range of topics, including computer vision, pattern recognition, data mining, and machine learning.

Christopher Roach

Linkedin
Map Reduce: 0-60 in 80 Minutes, Map Reduce: 0-60 in 80 Minutes, Map Reduce: 0-60 in 80 Minutes
Christopher Roach has been everything from an embedded software engineer working on missile defense, to an iOS developer at Apple, to the first engineer at an early stage Y Combinator startup, and he's currently putting his Python skills to work at Linkedin. Along the way, he's continued to nurture his academic interests with published papers in the areas of swarm intelligence and social network analysis. He holds degrees in Finance and Economics and a Master's degree in Computer Science and has had several Python related articles published in sources such as MacTech magazine and the O'Reilly network.

Felix Marczinowski

Blue Yonder
Exploratory Time Series Analysis of NYC Subway Data
Felix Marczinowski is a Data Scientist with a long history of working in Python. He did his PhD in solid state physics, and at Blue Yonder found a place to put his Python skills as well as his scientific background to good use. He works on several predictive analytics projects, contributing code and advising on software design and code-quality.

Francesc Alted

Blosc
Blosc: Sending data from memory to CPU (and back) faster than memcpy(), Data Oriented Programming
Francesc Alted is a freelance teacher, developer and consultant. Physicist by formation, he spent most of his life designing hardware and software systems while trying to squeeze the last drop of performance out of them (see a nice article he wrote here: http://www.pytables.org/docs/CISE-12-2-ScientificPro.pdf). Creator of PyTables, BLZ and Blosc and developer of Blaze and Numexpr. He likes good movies too. Email: faltet@gmail.com Twitter: @FrancescAlted GitHub: https://github.com/FrancescAlted

Frank Kaufer

bakdata
Python and Big Data Frameworks

Franta Polach

ipselex
Exploring Patent Data with Python
Franta has experience in building machine learning systems and research in cryptography. Among his interests are cryptography, privacy, anonymity, virtual currencies, functional programming and China. He holds a MSc and a B.S. in mathematics from the Charles University in Prague.

Giovanni Lanzani

GoDataDriven
Python and pandas as back end to real-time data driven applications
Giovanni Lanzani is a Data Whisperer at GoDataDriven, a small training and consultancy firm based in The Netherlands, the UK and India. Thanks to his PhD in Theoretical Physics, Giovanni spends his time at GoDataDriven applying Machine Learning and Data Science techniques to data of the most disparate companies and helps building and profiling (Python) data driven applications with his team.

Honza Král

Elasticsearch
Make sense of your (big) data using Elasticsearch
Honza is a Python programmer and Django core developer – since he is scared of the bright and shiny world of browsers, designers, and users he prefers to stay buried deep in the infrastructure code and just provides others with tools to do the actual site-building. Since 2008 Honza has been building content web sites for fun and profit. During this time he discovered Elasticsearch which lead to him joining the company behind it in 2013 to work on the Python drivers.

Ilan Schnell

Continuum Analytics
Conda: a cross-platform package manager for any binary distribution
Dr. Ilan Schnell has a Ph.D. in theoretical solid state physics from the University of Bremen in Germany. After having worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Los Alamos National Lab and at Georgetown University, he joined Enthought, where he mainly focused on building the Enthought Python distribution. He is also the author of the Bitarray Python library.

James Powell

NYC Python
Generators Will Free Your Mind, Generators Will Free Your Mind, Integration With the Vernacular (the NumPy Approach), Panel Discussion: "Shouldn't more companies be using data science?", Title Coming Soon
James Powell is a NYC-based Python programmer with experience in quantitative finance and data science. He's also very active in the Python community, where he organizes NYC Python which is the world's largest and most active Python meetup group. He also works with the numeric & scientific computing non-profit NumFOCUS to help organize the PyData conference series. In addition, he's a frequent speaker at Python conferences, and has been invited to speak at events such as PyData New York, PyData London, PyGotham, the conference ‘For Python Quants,’ and PyCon Spain.

Jean-Paul Schmetz

Chief Scientist, Hubert Burda Media
Dealing with Complexity

Jean-Paul is the Chief Scientist of Hubert Burda Media - a global media company. He is also the founder and CEO of 10betterpages GmbH.

He also serves on different board most notably on the Board of Directors of XING AG (a leading online professional network).

He was the CTO and CEO of Burda Digital from 1996 to 2003.

Jean-Paul received a Master's Degree in Philosophy (magna cum laude) from the University of Louvain (Belgium) and a B.A. in Economics from the University of Louvain. He is currently enrolled in a post-graduate program in Computer Science at Stanford University.

Jean-Paul is fluent in French, English, German and Dutch. He is an avid mathematician, hardware hacker and is fluent with all the latest software technologies.

John Mangual

Explorer Media
Color Analysis Through k-Means Clustering
I grew up in New York City, enthusiastic about Mathematics. Now I am a Data Scientist in San Juan, Puerto Rico helping the government with open data and transparency.

Karolina Alexiou

Teralytics AG
Mall Analytics Using Telco Data & Pandas
Big Data enthusiast.

Kashif Rasul

Freie Universität Berlin and polyport gmbh
CUDA 6 Tutorial, Intro to ConvNets
Kashif has a PhD. in Mathematics from the Freie Universität Berlin and is currently working for a startup in the area of geospatial data storage and analysis. He is passionate about high performance computing and has presented at NVIDIA's GTC in 2009 and at StrangeLoop in 2012, and is also contributing to the Open Source projects like Java CUDA bindings. Prior to finishing his PhD. he has worked at the Max Planck Institute in Golm, Germany and at Visage Imaging in Berlin as a software developer. He currently has a position in the Databases group at Freie Universität Berlin as well as working at a startup.

Lynn Root

Spotify, PyLadies
How to Spy with Python, How to Spy with Python, How to Spy with Python
Lynn Root is a software engineer at Spotify working on backend for partnership integrations. She is the founder and leader of PyLadies San Francisco, an international mentorship group for women and friends in the Python community. With PyLadies, Lynn regularly hosts local workshops, sprints, and events to promote Python to all experience levels of programmers. Lynn is also a board member of the Python Software Foundation and a member of the Django Software Foundation.

Miguel Vaz

d-fine GmbH
Networks meet Finance in Python
Currently at d-fine GmbH, he works as a management consultant in the field of financial risk management. He comes from a technical and quantitative background, with previous roles as a software developer and data analyst. In a former life, or so it feels like sometimes, he received his PhD for work in vocal interaction with a humanoid robot while at the Honda Research Institute. He is passionate about network models, information visualization, software, robots and all things communication and interaction.

Paul Balzer

MechLab Engineering
IPython and Sympy to Develop a Kalman Filter for Multisensor Data Fusion
Learned surveyor and studied vehicle mechatronics at University of Applied Sciences Dresden and is now Ph.D. student there in cooperation with the Chair of Transport Systems Information Technology of the Technische Universität Dresden. Started with Matlab years ago and is now in love with Python and Maps.

Pedro Miguel Dias Cardoso

Synthesio
Parallel processing using python and gearman
Pedro Miguel Dias Cardoso is the Text Analytic Director at Synthesio, a leader on social media listening platforms. He got an engineering degree in Electronics and Control Systems, and a Master in Speech processing. His career path started in Portugal, as a research engineer, followed by 4 years in Japan and 5 years in France. For the majority of time, he worked on speech processing, mostly on the machine learning side of it, be it acoustic modeling or language modeling. For the last 2 years Pedro Cardoso has been working on Natural Language Processing at Synthesio.

Philipp Mack

Blue Yonder
Exploratory Time Series Analysis of NYC Subway Data
Philipp Mack is a Senior Data Scientist working for Blue Yonder since 2007. He received his PhD in Experimental Particle Physics from the University of Karlsruhe. At Blue Yonder he is specialized in creating models for food retailer and mail order companies. During his work he gained a lot of insight into the processes of data ware houses and supply chains of different companies. In addition he performs quick data assessments and analysis in the industrial sector.

Radim Řehůřek

Faster than Google? Optimization lessons in Python.
Radim runs a privately owned consulting company that specializes in building systems for intelligent, automated analysis of (text) data: radimrehurek.com. A tech geek and developer at heart, Radim founded and led Seznam.cz’s research department (Sklik, Search, Zbozi, …), then moved on to develop and consult for various international companies and startups. Radim has lived around the globe with his wife for the past decade, but moved to Prague after receiving the Česká Naděje award for his PhD thesis in 2012. He’s now trying to evangelize data-driven business solutions and help aspiring entrepreneurs and established companies make the most of their data.

Ronert Obst

Pivotal
Massively Parallel Processing with Procedural Python
Ronert got his MSc in Statistics at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and now works as a Data Scientist at Pivotal (www.gopivotal.com) in Berlin.

Saul Diez-Guerra

Ampush
My First Numba, My First Numba , Speed Without Drag, Speed without drag
Saul Diez-Guerra is a senior software engineer at Ampush in New York City, where he uses Python to build ad management and bidding systems, after a stint in social network R&D at Telefónica. He hails from Spain, where he received both a Bachelors in Computer Science as well as one in Telecommunications.

Shankar

National University of Singapore
Introduction to Natural Language Processing with Python tools
Data Scientist at National University of Singapore: http://shanx.us

Sönke Niekamp

Blue Yonder
Exploratory Time Series Analysis of NYC Subway Data
Sönke Niekamp studied physics in Hannover, Innsbruck and Siegen. After receiving his PhD for a thesis in Quantum Information Theory, he joined Blue Yonder as a Data Scientist. He has been working on a variety of projects related to predictive analytics and automated decision making.

Thomas Wiecki

Quantopian & Brown University
Algorithmic Trading with Zipline, Bayesian Data Analysis with PyMC3
I am currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program at Brown University where I investigate the neuronal underpinnings of mental illness using quantitative methods like Bayesian Modeling. I also work as a quantitative researcher for Quantopian Inc where we are building the worlds' first browser based financial backtesting platform.

Travis Oliphant

Co-Founder & CEO, Continuum Analytics
Blaze, Building the PyData Community, Conda, Packaging and Deployment, Packaging and Deployment, Pythran: Static Compiler for High Performance, Scalable Analytics and Visualization: Connecting Expertise to Data With Python, Welcome

CEO and Co-Founder, Continuum Analytics Introduction to NumPy; Introduction to SciPy

Dr. Oliphant has a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the Mayo Clinic, and M.S. and B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering (and Math) from Brigham Young University. Travis has worked extensively with Python for numerical and scientific programming since 1997, and was the primary developer of the NumPy package and the author of the definitive Guide to NumPy. He is also the primary founding author of the SciPy package. During his academic career, he has worked in the fields of satellite remote sensing, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Ultrasound, elastography, and general inverse problems. He was an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Brigham Young University from 2001 to 2007 where he taught courses in probability theory, electromagnetics, inverse problems, and signal processing. In addition, he directed the BYU Biomedical Imaging Lab, and performed research on scanning impedance imaging. He has done consulting work since 1997 in laser scattering off of semiconductors, sparse matrix calculations for search engines, and mesh transformations for fluid dynamics. Dr. Oliphant co-founded Continuum Analytics, Inc. in 2012 and currently serves as its CEO.

Trent McConaghy

Solido Design
Driving Moore's Law with Python-Powered Machine Learning: An Insider's Perspective
Trent McConaghy is an engineer, entrepreneur, scientist, and author. He specializes in enterprise machine learning and tools for designing computer chips. He is cofounder and CTO of Solido Design Automation, which has Nvidia, Qualcomm, Huawei, and more as customers. While still in his 20s, he sold his first company, Analog Design Automation, to the billion-dollar industry leader Synopsys. He has written a PhD, 20 patents, 30 papers, two books, and two edited volumes. He delivered the keynote at Data Science Day Berlin 2014, and has given invited talks at MIT, Berkeley, Jet Propulsion Lab, and more. A native of Canada, he resides in Berlin.

Valentin Haenel

Blosc
Fast Serialization of Numpy Arrays with Bloscpack
I am a software engineer interested in the architectures of high-performance number crunching with Python. Specifically, I am interested in low-level aspects such interfacing Python with C code, strategies for efficient memory allocation, avoiding redundant memory copies and exploiting the memory hierarchy for accelerated computation. Occasionally, I flirt with machine-learning. In the past I have worked on psychophysics data analysis, large scale brain simulations, analytical engines for business intelligence and large-scale data-center monitoring. I wrote a book about using the Git version control system and have contributed to a diverse selection of over 50 open source projects. I currently reside in Berlin and work as a freelance software engineer and consultant.

Valerio Maggio

University of Salerno
Semantic Python: Mastering Linked Data with Python
Valerio Maggio has a PhD. in Computational Science from the University of Naples “Federico II” and he is currently a Postdoc Researcher at the University of Salerno. His research interests are mainly focused on Machine Learning and Software Engineering, recently combined with Semantic Web technologies for (big) linked data analysis.
 Valerio started developing open source software in 2004, when he was a bachelor degree student. In 2006, he wrote his first lines of Python in his favourite development environment (i.e., VIM). From then on, he contributed to several open source projects in this language. Currently he uses Python as the mainstream language for his machine learning code, making an intensive use of Scikit-learn and Matplotlib to crunch, munge, and analyse experimental data. He recently reviewed a book about plotting recipes with matplotlib, and he is currently authoring a book on massive machine learning computations with Scikit-learn. Valerio is also a member of the Italian Python community, who enjoys playing chess and drinking tea.

Vincent Warmerdam

GoDataDriven
Visualising Data through Pandas
Vincent D. Warmerdam is a data scientist and developer at GoDataDriven and a former university lecturer of mathematics and statistics. He is fluent in python, R and javascript and is currently checking out with scala and julia. Currently he does a lot of research on machine learning algorithms and applications that can solve problems in real time. The intersection of the algorithm and the use-case is of the most interest to him. During a half year sabbatical he travelled as a true digital nomad from Buenos Aires to San Fransisco while still programming for clients. He has two nationalities (US/Netherlands) and lives in Amsterdam.

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