Data Con LA

Data Con LA formerly known as Big Data Day LA is scheduled for August 17th 2019 at the University of Southern California. Registration is closed, we are sold out!

Keynote Livestream

Sponsors / 2019

Email Subash D’Souza at subash[at]dataconla.com if you are interested in being a sponsor for our 2019 event.

Host Sponsors

2019 - University of Southern California USC

Platinum Sponsors

Gold Sponsors

Networking Sponsors

Silver Sponsors

Bronze Sponsors

Partner Sponsors

2019 - Archangel Technology Consultants, LLC

Startup Showcase / 2019 Startup Showcase

2019 STARTUP SHOWCASE

Final Pitch Round:
Seven finalists will have the opportunity to present a 5-min pitch onstage to the panel of judges listed below on conference day

Prizes:
First Place – $1000 cash and a 1 one-on-one feedback and strategy session with a VC from TenOneTen Ventures*.
Second Place – $500 cash*.
Third Place – $250 cash*.

*More prizes to be announced later.

Data Con LA Business Data Scholarship

The Data Con LA 2019 Startup Showcase and MountainTop Data are partnering to offer data scholarships to all qualifying startups. This scholarship is available for any startup that needs targeted account and contact information for marketing, or access to a large business data pool for product functionality, or has a product that monetizes business data. MountainTop Data maintains a database of tens of millions of business contacts and companies. Data Con LA’s partnership with MountainTop Data can give you access to this data, free. For more information and to apply for a data scholarship check here.

Finalists

Judges

Aaron Crow

VP of Engineering at SPIDR Tech

Aaron is the head of engineering at SPIDR Tech, building the world’s first automated customer service platform for law enforcement agencies and fire departments. SPIDR's platform is allowing police and others serve their communities better, every day. Among other things, Aaron cares about strong engineering culture, team building, and surfing.

Arvind Murthy

Founder and Chief Strategist at Ursa South

Arvind is an entrepreneur with experience in brand building on social media. He is the founder of Ursa South, a digital agency that helps startups and established global brands connect with and craft brand stories that resonate via social media and in-person activations. He is an active startup advisor and early-stage investor with a focus on consumer wellness, personal care and the future of food. Arvind received his undergraduate degree from the UC Riverside and a Master of Science from Columbia University.

Dr Vandana (Ana) Mangal

Faculty at UCLA MS Online and Curriculum Innovation Advisor at Pepperdine University

Dr Mangal teaches AI, Transportation and Program Management at UCLA. She also advises Higher Ed institutions including Pepperdine University to bring innovation into the curriculum in the digital era. In her previous role as ED of the Easton Center at UCLA Anderson, she played a key role in bringing technology into the curriculum and Anderson now ranks #4 in tech careers for MBAs. She has published four books, papers and articles and speaks at conferences and forums.

Ethen Yao

Innovations Advisor at BLAST

Ethen is a financial technologies innovator with more than ten years of experience in financial technologies. He has thirteen financial technologies related patents, and has co-founded several financial technology platforms, such as, Blast.com, a FinTech savings and investment platform; Armatic.io, a Software as a Service accounts receivables automation and management platform, and more. Ethen's expertise in finance is supported by degrees from Harvard University and Villanova University. He also has professional subject matter certifications from Oxford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University. Ethen is also an investor and advisor at Blast, ATM.com and Givsum. Ethen is currently leading esports innovation efforts and agency digital transformation at Damage Esports in Los Angeles.

Michael Rivera

Founding Director, USC Marshall Venture Fund at Marshall School of Business - USC

Michael is the Founding Director of the USC Marshall Venture Fund. The Venture Fund is an industry agnostic venture capital fund investing in early-stage startups created by USC students, alumni, faculty, and staff or that stem from intellectual property generated at the university. Michael is active in the Southern California ecosystem as a mentor with Backstage Accelerator, Quake Capital Accelerator, and Blackstone Launchpad Accelerator. Michael founded and managed an early-stage venture firm in Santa Monica prior to joining USC. Michael received his J.D. from the Pennsylvania State University School of Law and his B.A. from Georgetown University. He is a member of the Washington, D.C. Bar. He serves on the Board of the Jason E. Sabbag Memorial Scholarship Fund at Georgetown University.

Minnie Ingersoll

Partner at TenOneTen

Minnie is a long-time Silicon Valley product leader and operations executive with experience building and scaling impact through elegant technical solutions and great teams. She recently moved back to LA after 20+ years in the Bay Area and is excited to be a part of the growing tech ecosystem of Southern California as an early-stage tech investor. Minnie started her career as an early product manager at Google where she co-founded the Access team; a cross-functional product, policy, and engineering team that spun off Google Fiber. After 11+ years, she left Google to begin her own entrepreneurial journey as the co-founder and COO of Shift, an online marketplace for used cars. Minnie learned a lot of lessons hiring hundreds of employees and scaling a $100M+ business. She is an active mentor and non-profit board member. In her spare time she volunteers for local government, surfs baby waves, and raises baby people. She recently moved back to LA after 20+ years in the Bay Area and is excited to be a part of the growing tech ecosystem of Southern California as an early-stage tech investor and host of LA Venture podcast

Punnoose Isaac

VP, Data at Headspace

As a thought leader in the BigData world, PI has pursued his several roles and responsibilities with a passion for analytics, business strategy, and engineering. Punnoose was previously Head of Analytics & Data Services, Edmunds.com

Keynote Speakers / 2019

Ron Galperin

L.A. Controller

Ron Galperin is the 19th Controller of the City of Los Angeles, elected in 2013 and again in 2017. He serves as the watchdog for taxpayers at City Hall, making sure public dollars are spent efficiently and effectively. He is also the paymaster, auditor and chief accounting officer for the City of Los Angeles. Galperin oversees a team that conducts independent audits, manages the City’s payroll and spending, reports on the City’s finances, pursues fraud and waste, and works to create a more transparent, accountable and modern city for residents. Galperin launched ControlPanel LA, the City’s first open data portal, in 2013. It features details on the goods and services Los Angeles buys, along with information on assets and liabilities, employee compensation, operating indicators and much more. Because of his efforts, L.A. has been named the “No. 1 Digital City” by the U.S. City Open Data Census three years in a row. Government Technology Magazine put Controller Galperin on its list of the “Top 25 Doers, Dreamers and Drivers.” In 2019, Galperin received the Tyler Public Sector Excellence Award. Read more about him here.

Subash D’Souza

Organizer at Data Con LA

Subash D'Souza is a Data Evangelist. He is the founder and organizer of Data Con La formerly known as Big Data Day LA, a data conference based in Sunny Southern California. He also organizes the Los Angeles Big Data Users Group and the Los Angeles Apache Spark Users Group. Subash's passions lies in building scalable and performant systems.

Abbass Sharif, PhD.

Academic Director, Master of Science in Business Analytics Program at the University of Southern California

Abbass is a professor of data science at USC Marshall School of Business, and he is the director of the MS in Business Analytics program. Professor Sharif specializes is in the field of statistical computing and data visualization and he has developed and published new multivariate visualization techniques for functional data, and currently he is developing visualization techniques to study brain activity data collected via the near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) technology. Professor Sharif teaches statistics courses that range from introductory statistics to data analysis for decision-making through to advanced modern statistical learning techniques, statistical computing and data visualization. (Host)

Anita Sengupta

Chief Product Officer / Co-Founder at at Airspace Experience Technologies

Dr. Sengupta is an aerospace engineer, rocket scientist, pilot, and veteran of the space program. She worked for NASA for 16 years where her engineering projects included her PhD research on developing the ion propulsion system for the Dawn Mission (currently in the main asteroid belt), the supersonic parachute that landed the Curiosity rover on Mars, and the Cold Atom Laboratory an atomic physics facility now on board the International Space Station. After leaving NASA she led the development of the hyperloop as senior vice president of engineering systems at Virgin Hyperloop, a technology that can enable ground based travel in excess of airline speed. Her current venture is Co-Founder and Corporate Officer at Airspace Experience Technologies (ASX), an electrified autonomous VTOL urban aerial mobility technology company.

Jeffrey Carpenter

Developer Advocate at Datastax

Jeff Carpenter is the Director of Developer Advocacy at DataStax, where he leverages his background in system architecture, microservices and Apache Cassandra to help empower developers and operations engineers to build distributed systems that are scalable, reliable, and secure. Jeff has worked on projects ranging from a complex battle planning system in an austere network environment, to a cloud-based hotel reservation system and is the author of Cassandra: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition. (Sponsored)

Mukund Kaushik

Head of Digital at SoCal Edison

Mukund Kaushik is the Head of Digital at Southern California Edison (SCE) where he leads the Digital Accelerator team. In his role he is responsible for accelerating the development of digital products that reduces the risk and improve the effectiveness of our operations using new digital technologies such as mobile, advanced analytics, automation and new digital practices like agile, DevOps and Design Thinking. Prior to SCE, Mukund was at Kimberly Clark, where he was the Vice President, Digital and Innovation. He led a global IT team that to supported the digital transformation effort of the consumer value chain He also held several positions at Honda North America, that included consumer, vehicle, and field applications, enterprise architecture and information security. (Sponsored)

Sid Mohasseb

Adjunct Professor at USC

Sid Mohasseb is a serial entrepreneur, venture investor, professor and speaker. He has built and sold numerous global companies. He has consulted for hundreds of organizations from hyper-growth startups to Fortune 500's. He also teaches Data Science at the University of Southern California.

Elliot Brook

Managing Director, Applied Intelligence at Accenture

Elliot Brook is a senior executive with Accenture’s applied intelligence practice. He’s architected 20+ complex analytic transformations for the world’s largest organizations including Nestle, MillerCoors, Johnson & Johnson, Cardinal Health, WarnerMedia, and State Farm. (Sponsored)

Joe Devon

Founding partner at Diamond and Co-Founder of GAAD

Joe Devon is a serial entrepreneur with a strong focus on community and the bleeding edge of technology. Joe is CoFounder of Diamond, a leading Digital Agency that works with companies such as Fox, Disney & the NFL. He also CoFounded Global Accessibility Awareness Day aka #GAAD. It is now a viral event that the major tech companies publicly celebrate each May, with a Twitter reach of 165 Million unique users. Joe has founding roles in LA Media Lab, a new initiative in the mold of MIT and NY's Media Labs and Television Four, a Broadband TV Production Company backed by Warner Bros & Sky TV. He is an advisor at USC's IT Program, Cross Campus, Dock, Cloud CMS, Empowertech & LAX Coastal Chamber of Commerce. He has served as Program Advisor for leading industry conferences such as DataConLA, Semtech Biz & Zendcon.

Keila Banks

International Speaker, Programmer, Entrepreneur

Keila is an inspirational inner city Los Angeles teenager that is an international speaker, programmer and entrepreneur. Probably best know for her viral Youtube video of her “Undefinable Me” Keynote speech at OSCON 2015 Portland wowing a crowd of 4000 she is more than just a one trick pony. At age 12 winning the Young Entrepreneur of the year award usually awarded to high school seniors she's shown her affinity to audiences of both tech and business. Check her inspirational videos here and here

Ani Okkasian

Associate Director at OMD USA/ Professor at Woodbury University

Ani Okkasian is a communications professional who seeks to close the gap between consumer data and consumer behavior by leveraging an academic background in interdisciplinary research to gain strategic insights that inform brand building, communication planning and creative solutions. Currently, Ani leads the Los Angeles based innovation unit within OMD, the 2019 Global Media Agency of the Year (Adweek), where she focuses on research & development and experimental activations. Ani is also adjunct professor of Interdisciplinary Research Methods and Future Studies at Woodbury University.

Elizabeth Owen, PhD

Director of Learning and Data Science at Age of Learning

Elizabeth Owen holds a PhD in Digital Media (School of Education, UW-Madison) focused in game-based learning analytics. Currently Director of Learning and Data Science at Age of Learning, she’s committed to leveraging machine learning to optimize adaptive, engaging learning systems. Previously a data scientist with GlassLab Games, LRNG, and Metacog, Elizabeth’s doctoral roots lie with Games+Learning+Society research and game development lab. Collaborators include EA, Zynga, and Popcap games, and Dr. Ryan Baker at UPenn in ongoing Educational Data Mining. Prior to graduate school, Dr. Owen was a K-12 educator for a decade, and founding teacher at an L.A. charter school (LAAAE.org).

Panels / 2019

Panels

IoT

The panel will start by talking about how the city and county are evolving toward being a data driven organization, what that means, and the challenges such a transformation means. The panel will look at what it means for success when it requires government to move from treating data like a tactical resource to being a strategic resource. For this to happen, data has to transcend organizational boundaries within the government. And, as we make progress on this front, we have to also start working to ways where data transcends government boundaries so that neighboring cities and county/city are sharing operational data. This is a far cry from where we are at today but we look at this as a journey, something to progress toward over time. Over the course of that journey, policies, politics, and needs will change so we a key need is not just to solve specific problems, but to lay a foundation for evolution.

Timings – 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM

Class – GFS 106

Big Data

Overview: Join us and data science thought-leaders for a screening of excerpts from the documentary “Big Data: Unlocking Success.” Learn about ___. This film profiles trailblazing experts from MGM Resorts International, Toyota Financial Services and other innovative companies. We’ll discuss the power, pitfalls, and potential in harnessing and interpreting data. Our panelists will reveal how today’s wealth of data drives strategic decisions across industries and share their visions for the future.

Why It Matters: According to a Forbes article, “Whether gathering data on the front end or making big decisions in the C-Suite, every single person in your organization must buy into the value [data] analytics brings”.

What You’ll Take Away: Learn how you can leverage data in your role—no matter the industry. The demand for data science talent will only increase in our economy as data affects all aspects of our lives. Discuss and network with our guest experts to learn about exciting career and business opportunities.

Timings – 1:15 PM- 3:15 PM

Class – GFS 106

Women Leading Data

From AI and machine learning to data discovery and real-time analytics, women are leading the advancement of data technologies. In this session, Stacey Broadwell, Brand Ambassador, Linkedin Local – Los Angeles, will interview five women leading data at prominent brands. This is a must-see session for anyone interested in catapulting there careers to the next level. We will discuss career paths, overcoming obstacles, blind spots and leading as a woman. But must importantly, we will discuss how we can raise the boats of every woman through kindness, words and action. Join us! Men welcomed and encouraged to attend.

Timings – 3:55 PM – 5:25 PM

Class – GFS 106

Big Data Moderator – Victor Solis

Director, Initia Education: Test Prep, Academic Coaching

Victor Solís is a film producer, educator, and founder of Initia Education, which provides college and test preparation plus mindfulness-based academic coaching and special programs for nonprofit youth organizations. Since 2007, he has guided students to gain admission to universities such as Stanford, Boston College, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, and UCLA, his alma mater.

Big Data Panel – Abbass Sharif, PhD.

Academic Director, Master of Science in Business Analytics Program at the University of Southern California

Abbass is a professor of data science at USC Marshall School of Business, and he is the director of the MS in Business Analytics program. Professor Sharif specializes is in the field of statistical computing and data visualization and he has developed and published new multivariate visualization techniques for functional data, and currently he is developing visualization techniques to study brain activity data collected via the near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) technology. Professor Sharif teaches statistics courses that range from introductory statistics to data analysis for decision-making through to advanced modern statistical learning techniques, statistical computing and data visualization.

Big Data Panel – Steve Rimar

CEO & Founder at Analytica Consulting

With over 15 years of experience in software engineering, business intelligence, and the IT industry, Steve Rimar currently works as a data analytics expert, technology evangelist, and entrepreneur. Amongst his multiple honors include being published in Investor’s Business Daily, CNN, NBC, InformationWeek, Accenture’s Annual Report, and Qualcomm’s Report About People. He is also the holder of two U.S. inventor patents.

Big Data Panel – Yves Bergquist

Program Director, AI & Neuroscience in Media at Entertainment Technology Center, USC

Yves Bergquist is an AI researcher and the Director of the “AI & Neuroscience in Media” Project at the Entertainment Technology Center. At ETC, which is funded by all 5 Hollywood studios (as well as technology companies such as Microsoft, Cisco, Nagra-Kudelski, Technicolor, and Nielsen), his team is researching and developing next-generation applications drawn from AI and neuroscience for the media and entertainment industry. Yves is also the founder and CEO of AI startup Corto, which is building a comprehensive knowledge engine to help media and entertainment companies develop deep insights into the narratives and mental models behind their content, and how various cognitive relationships with audiences drive performance. Corto leverages deep neuroscience and AI research to surface what attributes of media content (film, TV, advertising and music) resonate with what audiences segments, and how this cognitive alignment is driving content performance. Corto is currently in Private Alpha testing with Hollywood studios, music publishers, and ad agencies, where it is driving content strategy for a few large retail, technology and media brands. It will launch in Private Beta in Q3 2019.

Big Data Panel – Xavier Kochhar

Founder, The Video Genome Project; Head of Strategy and Business Development WarnerMedia (Direct-to-Consumer)

Xavier Kochhar is an expert in Direct-to-Consumer (DTC), personalization, and structured data strategy and monetization and in helping C-level executives improve technology and commercial models. Xavier has been both a long-time entrepreneur as well as a long-time senior media executive. He is the Founder of The Video Genome Project, which was acquired by Hulu in order to power search, recommendation, discovery, and personalization. Prior to that, Xavier was the Managing Partner of MediaLink, which was acquired by Ascential plc (LSE: ASCL), the international media strategy company. As a senior executive, Xavier is the head of strategy and business development for WarnerMedia’s direct-to-consumer unit and before that was at a number of major media and content companies including The Walt Disney Company, Hulu, and The William Morris Agency (WME). He also currently invests in and advises early and mid-stage companies on their monetization, product, user experience, and data architecture strategies, while sitting on the board of video OTT, IP rights management, and blockchain technology companies.

IoT Moderator – Jerry Power

Executive Director of The Institute for Communication Technology Management (CTM) at University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business

Jerry is a founding member of the I3 Consortium, a group that is working to create an open source Internet-of-Things data governance tool that allows communities of independent IOT device owners to work together as active members of the expanding data ecosystem. Jerry is also the co-author of a book to be coming out August 2019 entitled “The Real Time Revolution: Transforming Your Organization to Value Customer Time”

IOT Panel – Alex Pudlin

Senior Data Scientist, Innovation Team, City of Los Angeles - Mayor's Office of Budget and Innovation

As Senior Data Scientist for Mayor Eric Garcetti's Innovation Team, Alex leads data-driven initiatives to help address civic issues as varied as housing and business displacement, inequitable job access, and homelessness. Projects delivered include an interactive mapping application to assess gentrification and displacement risk in Los Angeles and a tool to help LAPD recruitment officers locate diverse populations for hiring. Prior to the City of Los Angeles, Alex worked on the implementation of a demand-based parking pricing model for Xerox. Alex graduated with a Bachelor's degree from Brown University and a Master's in Urban Planning from UCLA. Outside of work, Alex manages the data visualization website igotcharts.com and plays pinball in the LA Pinball League at the barcade, 82

IOT PANEL – Jagjit Dhaliwal

Deputy CIO at County of Los Angeles, Office of CIO

Jagjit comes to the County of Los Angeles with 17+ years of diversified IT consulting experience across multiple industry domains including Media & Entertainment (Studio, Education & Gaming), Telecom, Banking, Insurance and Manufacturing domains across different geographical locations globally. His main focus has been on IT transformation, operations efficiencies, enterprise initiatives, application modernization, and the adaption of emerging technologies. He has a wealth of experience in supporting complex systems delivery in a global onsite/offshore operating environment and managing large diverse teams.

Women Leading Data Moderator – Stacey Broadwell

Brand Ambassador at LinkedIn Local Los Angeles

Stacey Broadwell is a Southern California native from Orange County and a 3x sponsored snowboarder who competed extensively in Halfpipe, Big Air and Slopestyle competitions. Stacey graduated college from San Diego State University with a B.S. in Finance and worked as a Financial Analyst for three years before launching her first company, IT Talent Search. Stacey also manages CTO Roundtable events & TechRecruit Conferences in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco & Austin to educate Talent Acquisition and Recruitment professionals on innovations and technologies to attract talent across all industries.

Women Leading Data Panel – Aarthi Sridharan

Senior Director, Data Insights and Analytics at Beachbody

Aarthi is an accomplished Data and Technology Professional with vast experience in data engineering, management and Analytics. She is an experienced Senior Director with a demonstrated history of working in the health wellness and fitness industry. Aarthi is skilled in Dimensional Modeling, Oracle Database, Databases, Data Warehousing, Data Migration, Data Engineering, Master Data Management, Reporting, Analytics and Big Data Platform. Strong information technology professional graduated from University of Illinois at Chicago. Aarthi is experienced in Data & Analytics Road Mapping and in Data Architecture

Women Leading Data Panel – Anita Sengupta

Chief Product Officer / Co-Founder at at Airspace Experience Technologies

Dr. Sengupta is an aerospace engineer, rocket scientist, pilot, and veteran of the space program. She worked for NASA for 16 years where her engineering projects included her PhD research on developing the ion propulsion system for the Dawn Mission (currently in the main asteroid belt), the supersonic parachute that landed the Curiosity rover on Mars, and the Cold Atom Laboratory an atomic physics facility now on board the International Space Station. After leaving NASA she led the development of the hyperloop as senior vice president of engineering systems at Virgin Hyperloop, a technology that can enable ground based travel in excess of airline speed. Her current venture is Co-Founder and Corporate Officer at Airspace Experience Technologies (ASX), an electrified autonomous VTOL urban aerial mobility technology company.

Women Leading Data Panel – Carmen Honacker

Sr. Manager - Global Fraud Strategy at Sony PlayStation

Carmen leads the global fraud strategy for PlayStation. Carmen cares deeply and is super passionate about fighting fraud and cybercrime, as well supporting women in business, protecting children and making the world a better place.

Women Leading Data Panel – Elizabeth Owen, PhD

Director of Learning and Data Science at Age of Learning

Elizabeth Owen holds a PhD in Digital Media (School of Education, UW-Madison) focused in game-based learning analytics. Currently Director of Learning and Data Science at Age of Learning, she’s committed to leveraging machine learning to optimize adaptive, engaging learning systems. Previously a data scientist with GlassLab Games, LRNG, and Metacog, Elizabeth’s doctoral roots lie with Games+Learning+Society research and game development lab. Collaborators include EA, Zynga, and Popcap games, and Dr. Ryan Baker at UPenn in ongoing Educational Data Mining. Prior to graduate school, Dr. Owen was a K-12 educator for a decade, and founding teacher at an L.A. charter school (LAAAE.org).

Tutorials / 2019

Seating to the tutorials is limited. We only have 150 seats available for Data Science and 100 for Blockchain. Instead of doing a signup page, we have decided that the first 150 that line up at the Classes – JFF LL 105 and 100 at JFF LL 125 will be granted entry. To stand in line you must have a wifi capable laptop. This is the only requirement in addition to having an event badge. Please start lining up at 1:15 PM.

DataScience

Data Science tutorial is designed for people who are new to Data Science. This is beginner level session so no prior coding or technical knowledge is required. Just bring your laptop with WiFi capability. The session starts with a review of what is data science, the amount of data we generate and how companies are using that data to get insight. We will pick a business use case, define the data science process, followed by hands-on lab using python and Jupyter notebook. During the hands-on portion we will work with pandas, numpy, matplotlib and sklearn modules and use a machine learning algorithm to approach the business use case.

Timings – 2:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Class – JFF LL 105

Zia Khan

Tutorial Instructor

BlockChain

Blockchains permeate society and have cultivated followings ranking in the tens of millions. Many have hailed bitcoin, the progenitor of all blockchains, digital gold and one of the most important technologies to date. By design, they are trust-less, permanent, and censorship resistant. This tutorial will help you understand some of the important design decisions that go into building a blockchain and get you started writing your own. The session will be broken down into 4 parts with activities in-between:Introduction To Blockchains: A brief description of what this technology is and some history about how it got started.A High Level Architecture: The different components of blockchains including: networking, block validation, consensus, state management, etc.In-Depth On Validation: A deep dive on blockchain validation including: consensus, fault tolerance, and consistency.In-Depth On Networking: A deep dive into blockchain networking including: gossip and synchronization.Since there are so many different kinds of blockchains and technologies involved in constructing them, this tutorial will be focused on developing an example blockchain.

Timings – 2:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Class – JFF LL 125

Abraham Elmahrek

Tutorial Instructor

Speakers / 2019

Amarita Natt

Managing Director at EconOne Research

Annie Flippo

Head of Data Science at Thinknear by Telenav

Ash Pahwa

CEO at A+ Web Services

Boaz Brudner

Senior Engineering Group Manager at Zillow

Chaitanya Rudrabhatla

Executive Director at Sony Pictures Entertainment

Christian Siagian

Organizer at AILA

Dan Kernaghan

Technical Director, Big Data Solutions at Pitney Bowes

David Anderson

Principal Solutions Engineer at MemSQL

Don Malloy

Chairman at OATH

Eysha Powers

Cryptographic Software Developer at IBM

Fiona Li

Manager, Analytics at Ticketmaster/ Live Nation

Jacklyn Agor

Head of Business Development & Sales at Puppet Master Marketing

Jatinder Assi

Data Engineering Manager at GumGum

Jayaraman Palaniappan

Principal Solutions Architect at Agilisium

Jayesh Patel

Sr. Data Engineer at Rockstar Games

Jeff Cooper

Senior Director, Data at FabFitFun

Jeffrey Carpenter

Developer Advocate at DataStax

Jesse Mauck

CEO at Zigr Inc.

Jesse Steinweg-Woods

Senior Data Scientist at Honey

Jim Benedetto

Chief Data Officer at Core Scientific

Joey Beitdashtoo

EVP, Corp Bus Dev & Alliances at Systech Solutions

John Peach

Sr. Data Scientist (Applied Scientist III) at Amazon/ Alexa

Jose-Luis Ambite

Research Team Leader at USC ISI

Juan Vasquez

Data Programs Manager at City of Los Angeles Office of Finance

Kaylin Linke

Head of Solutions Architecture at Socialgist

Ken Chang

Cybersecurity Researcher at University of California - Berkeley

Lorenzo Rossi

Data Scientist at City of Hope Medical Center

Maria Khalusova

Developer Advocate at Jetbrains

Mark Quinsland

Sr. Field Engineer at Neo4j

Mingmin Chen

Senior Software Engineer II at Uber

Mukund Kaushik

Head of Digital at SoCal Edison

Obaid Sarvana

Associate Manager - Software Innovation practice at Accenture

Piyush Kumar

Director Technology at MakeMyTrip

Preet Singh

CEO at Enginelitix

Rashmina Menon

Senior Data Engineer at GumGum

Robert Hodges

CEO at Altinity

Shweta Shetty

Software Architect at Teradata

Sonia Macias

Scrum Master at Fox(Film, TV & Sports)

Stan Dyro

Sr. Data Engineer at Los Angeles Times

Tim Kreytak

CEO at Ironside

Todd Stoffel

Product Manager at MariaDB

Vivian Sultan

Professor-IS & BM at California State University, Los Angeles

AI/ ML/ Data Science

Beginner – Careers in Data Science – John Peach of Amazon/Alexa – Types of roles in Data Science, how to break into those roles or advance your career. The audience will be able to assess their strengths and areas for improvement. We will also discuss a thought process that is used by the most successful data scientists.

Beginner – Know Your Customer – Fiona Li of Ticketmaster/ Live Nation – In marketing, customer lifetime value (LTV, sometimes called CLV or CLTV) is a prediction of the net cash flow attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. The prediction model can have varying levels of sophistication and accuracy, ranging from heuristic to the use of complex machine learning techniques. LTV in a non-contractual setting is widely accepted to be more difficult than in a contractual setting, in which the churn rate can be simplified as a constant. – As the world’s largest concert promoter, Ticketmaster is focused on connecting live events to millions of our fans in a non-contractual and discrete setting. We adopted a paradigm called RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) to make predictions of fans two-year lifetime value to help make decisions including, for example – new product feature launch, SEM bidding automation, overall budgeting and essentially implement a winning strategy driven by customer lifetime value.- In this talk we will discuss RFM and other probabilistic models we used and how the results of the analysis helped drive business decisions. We will provide an overview of: (1) Customer lifetime value using RFM (2) Probabilistic Models: Bayesian Models, Beta-Geometric/Beta-Binomial Model (BG/BB) (3) A case study: how to use LTV for a new feature launch

Intermediate – Best Practices for Prototyping Machine Learning Models for Healthcare – Lorenzo Rossi of City of Hope National Medical Center – The talk focuses on supervised learning from the Electronic Health Records, covering cohort definition, data preparation and performance metrics. There are many ways, often less intuitive, to overfit in this domain. The material should be useful to machine learning practitioners dealing with very unbalanced data in time domain.

Intermediate – Building a Knowledge Graph for Data Science Training on the Web – Jose-Luis Ambite of USC Information Sciences Institute – We describe BigDataU.org, a portal for learning data science, which includes over 12,000 training resources available on the Web, and how we use data science methods, including data extraction, data integration, machine learning, information retrieval, and natural language processing, to automatically build this knowledge graph of training resources.

Advanced – Optimization Algorithms for Deep Learning – Ash Pahwa of A+ Web Services – Deep Learning is a branch of Artificial Intelligence that is based on the architecture of Neural Networks. When the number of hidden layers in a neural network is extended, it becomes a Deep Learning Neural Network. The applications of Deep Learning Neural Networks are Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN).Gradient Descent optimization technique has been used successfully in many Machine Learning models. However, Gradient Descent algorithm is slow to converge for Deep Learning models like CNN and RNN. Convergence means iteratively moving towards the minimum point of the cost function.Recently many new optimization algorithms have been introduced based on Momentum which converges faster than Gradient Descent. The other optimization algorithms are based on slowing down the learning rate as we move towards convergence. These algorithms are called AdaGrad (Adaptive Gradient), RMS Prop (Root Mean Square Propagation), and Adam (Adaptive Moments). This talk will cover the details of these optimization algorithms and discuss the advantages they offer compared with Gradient Descent algorithm.

Advanced – E-Commerce Product Categorization at Scale – Jesse Steinweg-Woods of Honey – At Honey, we provide a shopping platform across thousands of different stores. It is necessary to categorize all products from vendors into a single categorization taxonomy to make items easier to search for and recommend. This talk will show how we categorize products, utilizing deep learning at scale.

(Sponsored) Beginner – Data Acquisition Made Easy: Accessing social conversations at scale – Kaylin Linke of Socialgist – Through our partnership with social media platforms, Socialgist provides the plumbing to streamline access. We’ll review the highlights of these datasets, the data delivery details and walk through examples of NLP powered analysis.

(Sponsored) Beginner – Real Time Face Detection through a Webcam Using AI – Obaid Sarvana of Accenture – In this session we will provide an introduction to TensorFlow.js. We will then use a step by step walkthrough for building a fully functional real time face detection using nothing but a webcam, a browser, Tensorflow.js and face-api.js.

Data

Beginner – A closer look: Exploratory Data Analysis with Spark and IntelliJ IDEA – Maria Khalusova of JetBrains – A typical workflow of a Data Scientist involves some level of exploratory data analysis. If you’re using Python when working with your data, you are probably quite familiar with packages like pandas, matplotlib, seaborn and others that help you get the initial familiarity with the data and understand what are the best approaches for your next step. Switching from pandas to Spark – how do you explore your data? How do you visualise it? How do you understand it better before crafting your Spark jobs? In this talk I’ll take a dataset and will guide you through the numerous ways you can explore your data with Spark and a new plugin for IntelliJ IDEA.

Beginner – MetaConfig driven FeatureStore with Feature compute & Serving Platform powering Machine Learning @MakeMyTrip – Piyush Kumar of MakeMyTrip – MakeMyTrip – India’s #1 online travel platform having more than 70% of the traffic from mobile apps embarked on a journey to revolutionize its customer experience by building a scalable, personalized, machine learning based platform which powers onboarding, in-funnel and post-funnel engagement flows, such as ranking, dynamic pricing, persuasions, cross-sell and propensity models. For a company like MakeMyTrip, the next wave of consumer growth is driven and powered by data products for personalization, context-aware mobile experiences. Having a better data architecture to ingest user activity streams (events), processing and data APIs enable a foundation for real-time feature generation for machine learning models. Topics include:* Why common feature-store, removing dataset fragmentation caused by usecase-by-usecase approach!* Productionizing ML via standardization : MetaConfigs & FeatureCatalog | Reducing Data-Tech Debt* Developing Real-Time Serving store over Spark Streaming, Kafka, RocksDB, Akka HTTP Data APIs* Lifecycle of feature generation | Online(Near Real-Time) & Historical(Batch) Compute* Consistent Feature Engineering & Model Deployment for DSA: DataScience AutomationAs Technology we leverage Kafka, Spark (Streaming, SQL), Scala, Python, AWS (S3, EMR, Glue and other services), DRUID, Hive, Presto, Cassandra, RocksDB, Redis, Akka HTTP

Intermediate – Integrating Kafka with a Real-Time Database – David Anderson of MemSQL – Overview of MemSQL and Kafka pipelines. Demo using public kafka topics and a MemSQL database instance in AWS.

Intermediate – Big Data Modeling with Spark SQL: Make data valuable – Jayesh Patel of Rockstar Games – In this Data age, business applications generate big data. To generate value out of large scale data applications, data models are the key. Data models serve various purposes, and it is essential to show reliable insights in a timely fashion. This session will cover the technical aspect of leveraging Spark’s distributed engine to process Big data to generate insights. It includes a few aspects to optimize processes with Spark SQL. Come join me to explore the process of making data interesting!

Intermediate – Unifying streaming and message queue with Apache Kafka – Mingming Chen of Uber – In distributed systems, retries are inevitable. From networkerrors to replication issues and even outages in downstream dependencies, services operating at a massive scale must be prepared to encounter, identify, and handle failure as gracefully as possible. At Uber, we leverage Apache Kafka, a popular open source distributed pub/sub messaging platform, which has been industry-tested for delivering high performance at scale. We build competing consumption semantics with dead letter queues on top of existing Kafka APIs and provide interfaces to ack or nack out of order messages with retries and in-process fanout features.

Advanced – Large scale streaming analytics using cloud based managed services – Jay Palaniappan of Agilisium – Ingest, store, analyze, and monitor a large volume of real-time streaming data using cloud-based managed services. The reference architecture will showcase the following solution areas using managed services/serverless technologies.- Setup and Manage Multi-Region infrastructure via CI/CD – Ingest and Store a large volume of streaming data (Ex: 100K records/second) – Analyze and derive insights in near real-time – Monitor the infrastructure and pipelines.

(Sponsored) Intermediate – Patterns for Persistence and Streaming in Cloud Architectures – Jeffrey Carpenter of DataStax – How do you effectively select and integrate technologies for moving and storing data for your cloud applications? In this session, we’ll discuss the proper usage of various styles of databases, caches, and streaming solutions and effective patterns for combining these technologies, using Apache Cassandra and Apache Kafka as examples.

(Sponsored) Beginner – Graph Theory Takes on the Opioid Epidemic – Mark Quinsland of Neo4J – Real-world examples of how graph databases and graph-based ML/AI are being utilized to combat the Opioid Epidemic.

Emerging Tech

Intermediate – Data warehouse and Kubernetes: Lessons from ClickHouse Operator – Robert Hodges of Altinity Ltd – Kubernetes is a natural fit to manage high performance databases. We’ll prove this through learnings from work on the ClickHouse Operator, which stands up ClickHouse data warehouses. We’ll cover the architecture of data warehouse on Kubernetes well as specifics like resource design, storage, performance, and monitoring. Challenges aplenty, but opportunities too!

Beginner – Box Office Strategy: Do Release Dates Matter? – Preet Singh of Enginelitix – In 2018, Disney released the much-awaited spinoff in the Star Wars universe: Solo: A Star Wars Story, based on the character made iconic by Harrison Ford. Despite a blockbuster production and marketing budget, the film went on to severely underperform at the box office. Trade pundits had their favorite theories why this happened, but perhaps the most telling explanation came from Ron Howard, the movie’s director. In an interview with Josh Horowitz, the very first reason he attributed the failure to was it’s Memorial Day release date. Strategy for theatrical releases of movies encompass several factors, but perhaps none so deliberated upon as the release date. Will the movie clash with a feature in a similar genre? Will a summer release date bode better than a December release? Are all long weekends equal? Hollywood has an abundance of stories where a movie’s poor performance is attributed to an ill-chosen release date. In this talk, I try to find the answers by examining patterns in release-date strategy. As we shall see, the results don’t always align with conventional wisdom, and that differing factors can make an otherwise excellent choice, an extremely poor one.

Intermediate – Securing IoT Data with Pervasive Encryption – Eysha Shirrine Powers of IBM – The Internet of Things brings network connectivity to everyday devices, many of which may be handling sensitive data. Let’s examine the flow of health information in an IoT environment and explore how pervasive encryption can protect IoT data in transit and data at rest in a complex computing environment.

Intermediate – So You got Hacked, how Quickly Can your Company Recover? – Don Malloy of OATH – History of how we got here. What IoT devices are most vulnerable? This presentation will demonstrate where hacks are most successful, through hardware, software, firmware or the radio connected to the network. The hacking of IoT devices and systems explained in 6 basic steps. On the other side, protecting devices continue to be a challenging effort. Product vendors/developers and customers are all responsible for improving IoT device security. The top 10 vulnerabilities will be presented and discussed.

Intermediate – User Motivation: Refining Customer Segments with Location – Annie Flippo of Thinknear by Telenav – Combined audience intelligence and location-based data with machine learning capabilities to reveal a never-before-seen and hyper-granular view into customers lives- Who They Are- Where Have They Been- What are their Motivations

Intermediate – Cyber Security Threats & Counter Measures – Jesse Mauck of Zigr Inc. – I would like to bring light to the International Cyber warfare trends that are happening all over the world involving hacks and what threats quantum computing poses including the benefits of cryptography in blockchain, vulnerabilities in autonomous vehicles, and smart grids involving Iot devices. Cancelled – Apologies for the inconvenience

(Sponsored) Intermediate – Data is the New Business Currency – Jim Benedetto of Core Scientific/ PureStorage – The data explosion is very real. According to IDC, the global datasphere will grow from 33 zettabytes in 2018 to 175 by 2025. At the same time, IDC also estimates that 80% of data is unstructured. Unstructured data, which comes in the form of emails, social media, blogs, documents, images and videos, represent a significant source of opportunity for businesses. But due to its unstructured nature, it is difficult for people to gain insight from it using conventional systems. The reality: AI turns data into information. And without AI, companies will not only be very quickly overrun with data, but also unable to monetize that data for competitive edge.

(Sponsored) Intermediate – Hybrid Transactional Analytical Processing (HTAP) with MariaDB Platform – Todd Stoffel of MariaDB – MariaDB Platform brings true Hybrid Transactional Analytical Processing (HTAP) to modern applications. Learn how MariaDB Platform enriches your user’s experience, and brings value to your business. Topics include: Automatic synchronization of row and column based storage engines Intelligent routing of queries to appropriate storage engine Advanced analytics queries including windowing functions MariaDB Platform connectors, including Kafka and Spark.

Data Infrastructure & Security

Beginner – The challenges of data science for veteran media organizations – Stan Dyro of Los Angeles Times – A deep look at evangelizing data to drive product decisions at media companies like the Los Angeles Times. Building a data-driven tech-first culture is tough work for veteran companies, but building scalable data infrastructure for data science, engineering, and analytics teams is easier than ever.

Beginner – Move Fast, Think Big: The Principles of Managing Large Scale Big Data and Application Development Projects – Boaz Brudner of Zillow -Directing software development and big data initiatives can be a challenge. It is often difficult to continuously deliver good software products on time and with good quality.We will dive into ways we can ensure our success with core foundations such as good planning, sound architecture, managed cloud solutions, CI/ CD, testing and solid coding.If you want to be a strong development lead you should hear this!

Intermediate – Scrum Overview – Sonia Macias of Fox (Film, TV and Sports) – The scrum overview presentation provides the participant with a working knowledge of how to confidently run scrum in a data analytics team. The scrum overview starts with a history of how scrum came into the development landscape and took over the waterfall methodology of the past. The scrum overview is an interactive approach on the key concepts of scrum.

Intermediate – Orchestration of Blue-Green deployment model with AWS Document DB and ECS cluster using Terraform – Chaitanya Rudrabhatla of Sony Pictures Entertainment – Businesses in modern era are ever changing and they need newer updates to be delivered continuously. Ensuring the 100 percent uptime and maintaining a zero downtime while deploying these new updates to the databases and applications, is one of the key challenges faced by the DevSecOps teams. Blue Green deployment model, creating and restoring the databases quickly from the snapshots on the cloud, and creating a repeatable process using Terraform as infrastructure code, are some of the latest proven techniques in achieving the above objectives. These are discussed and demonstrated in this session.

Intermediate – Applied Privacy Engineering Study on SEER database – Ken Chang, Heather A Mcpherson, Matt Holmes and Serena Vilalobos of University of California – Berkeley – On the data privacy engineering domain, numerous studies have described k-anonymity as a criterion for measuring the level of anonymization in a dataset where various k-anonymity algorithms and models have been designed and developed. In seeking privacy versus utility balance, we applied anonymization process on SEER database, the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program datset of cancer research, an organization which compiles cancer data from numerous cancer research organizations.

Advanced – One (Key) Ring to Rule Them All: Unified Identity Management for Vantage – Shweta Shetty of Teradata – Security is ubiquitous and integral throughout the entire lifecycle of an application right from the design and implementation to deployment and operations. Whether you build software for enterprises, mobile, or internal microservices, security is important. To that end, Identity and access management is the key to the security and the software infrastructure.Establishing user’s identities before they can access resources is a key security requirement when building software applications and the capability of enabling single-sign-on would be a desirable feature. For Identity and Access Management Standards like SAML, OIDC, and SPIFFE help us solve identity and authentication which answers the most important question of who you are. Security is best delegated as no one wants to re-invent the wheel, so for Identity Management Keycloak which is an open source product helps us achieve our Identity management solutions. Keycloak is an identity provider that creates, maintains, and manages identity information for principals while providing authentication services to relying applications within a federation or distributed network. This talk will walk through how we are using Keycloak to achieve solve the IAM security in Vantage which is our Data Analytics Platform and how we are achieving single-sign-on which is one of the most desirable side effects of Identity Management which will help users gain access control for multiple related and independent software systems in a seamless manner.

(Sponsored) Intermediate – Electrifying Big Issues Through Analytics – Mukund Kaushik of Socal Edison – At SCE we are leveraging Advanced Analytics to reduce our wildfire risk, improve our customer satisfaction and improve our overall efficiency for our work force. In this session we will present how we are addressing these challenges and what opportunities exist for prospective employees and partners to assist SCE in this journey.

Intermediate – State of the Art of Innovation in Computer Vision – Christian Siagian – Technology such as Computer Vision, along with Natural Language Processing, and Robotics, provides a more natural way to obtain subject matter data, especially from humans and their interactions. Popularity and success of deep learning of the decade has helped brought academic research in Artificial Intelligence into the private sector at a much faster rate. Here, we will delve deeper into the current state of Computer Vision, and how this affect how processing raw image, video, 3D, and similar spatially and temporally arranged data. We will: Start with the big picture of demands of perceptual system in the current business, climate, Various Computer Vision topics that are currently pursued, and the level of activities, State of the art of these topics, the breakthroughs and challenges, How data availability plays a factor in stimulating research progress, Predictions of the short and longer term

Visualizations/ UI/ Business Use Cases

Beginner – Open Data & Maps As Tools for More Impact – Juan Vasquez of City of Los Angeles Office of Finance – Government is eternally behind modern day, best-in-class technology. But, what if it wasn’t? This is mentality we embrace so that we can effectively use open data, data analytics, mapping/GIS, and storytelling to modernize a 340-person government agency tasked with generating $4 Billion every year.Attendees will hear and see real-life examples of how local government in the nation’s 2nd largest city is striving towards excellence through data and advanced technologies.Specifically, In this session attendees will learn in detail about how any organization can leverage:- Data strategy- Product development (dashboards, applications)- Data Visualization- Mapping/GISThe presenter will share 3 to 5 real-world use cases, intention, and outcomes.

Beginner – How to Teach an Old Firm New Tricks – Amarita Natt of EconOne Research – One of the first tasks data scientists face is helping their firms update their tools and infrastructure to meet current technology standards and attract talented employees. Sometimes companies are already heavily invested in existing frameworks and are reluctant to change. Using my experience introducing R, Python, AWS, and SQL to my firm, I discuss several cases of how to identify potential points of entry for new tools and techniques, how to engage key stakeholders in open conversation about moving to unfamiliar platforms, and how to ease the transition and adoption of these tools.

Intermediate – Don’t Talk Data to Me – Jacklyn Agor of Puppet Master Marketing – A Geek’s Guide to Actionable Storytelling. Personas: Knowing and motivating your audience. – Reverse engineering the customer journey. – How not to be creepy. – 3 Ways to Tell the Perfect Story

Intermediate -Time Series Forecasting of Programmatic Inventory at Scale – Jatinder Singh and Rashmina Menon of GumGum –When advertisers connect with GumGum with their targeting details, it is important to know if we have enough matching inventory from the publisher network to serve the ads. At GumGum, we have ~10B programmatic inventory impressions per day. The goal is to enable the business to make real time predictions about the volume of inventory using time series forecasting models at this huge scale. , ,The forecasting workflow involves the below steps. , ,1. Daily pipelines to create and enrich samples ,We use AMIND sampling which reduces the data size from 20 GB to 1.5 GB per day. The enriched samples are persisted in Spark SQL tables. ,2. Time series forecasting in real time ,We use our in-house model written in R which is modified ARIMA that can capture sinusoidal trends. The impressions served have varying trends as a function of time, bidder and the type of ad. We train the R model with this data and use sampling multipliers to forecast the impressions. ,3. Optimizing caching layer ,In the talk, we will discuss about performance results from benchmarking various caching/persistence techniques in Spark including Databricks Delta. We will also discuss challenges with scale and next steps involved like using deep learning models for forecasting.

Advanced – Location Analytics For Smart Grid Reliability – Vivian Sultan of California State University, Los Angeles – Analytics have been a popular topic in both research and practice, particularly in the energy field. The use of analytics can help advance Smart Grid reliability via, for example, elucidating a root cause of power failure, defining a solution for a blackout through data, or implementing the solution with continuous monitoring and management. This research, as guided by the Design Science Research methodology, attempts to unveil the novel use of location analytics in enhancing Smart Grid reliability. The research is organized as follows; 1) a systematic literature review of Smart Grid reliability research is presented, 2) a spatially enhanced analytical model for power outages is developed, and 3) a prototype of a Geographic Information System (GIS) application is developed to identify the optimal locations for Smart Grid interventions (e.g., automated distribution switches, batteries, etc.) considering the many operating parameters, various outage scenarios, and the potential benefits to the Smart Grid. A general discussion based on the findings of the research, limitations, and needs for future research is offered in the conclusion section.

Advanced – Innovating with Data – Joey Beitdashtoo of Systech Solutions, Inc. – Data has the power to create new businesses and even new industries. The challenge is that there are many biases about the use of data in a business.There is a view that data is just about analytics or reporting. In this scenario, it’s relegated to providing insight about the business. There is another view, that data is simply an input into existing products. In this case, data would be used to enrich a current business process, but not necessarily change the process. While these cases are both valid, the power of the Data era enables much greater innovation than simply these incremental approaches!

(Sponsored) Intermediate – Working with data from your most engaged customers – Jeff Cooper of FabFitFun – Strong brand communities are the future of retail. Data teams can benefit enormously from what these communities share, but must also navigate major challenges these groups create for testing and analysis. In this talk, we’ll describe how FabFitFun uses engaged member data to support our central insights and algorithms.

(Sponsored) Intermediate – Pitney Bowes methodologies to Organize, Enrich and Analyze data from a location perspective – Dan Kernaghan of Pitney Bowes and Tim Kerytak of Ironside – Location brings an opportunity to gain a competitive edge by unlocking new insights that others have not considered. Why have they not considered location in they past? Because location is messy! Lat/longs, shapes on a map, lines on a map, routes, distance calculations… all of this data is often messy and difficult to bring into an analytics application. Learn how Pitney Bowes and Ironside of applied sophisticated methodologies to Organize, Enrich and Analyze data from a location perspective.

Schedule / 2019

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About the Conference / What You Need To Know

Data Con LA 2018 Highlight Video

Data Con LA is the largest, of its kind, data conference in Southern California. Spearheaded by Subash D’Souza and organized and supported by a community of volunteers, sponsors and speakers, Data Con LA features the most vibrant gathering of data and technology enthusiasts in Los Angeles.

Data Con LA began as Big Data Day LA in 2013, with just over 250 attendees. We have since grown to over 550 attendees in 2014, 950+ attendees in 2015, 1200+ attendees in 2016, and 1550+ attendees in 2017. In 2018, we re-branded ourselves from Big Data Day LA to Data Con LA. We also had over 1800+ attendees attend. This year we expect that tally to be over 2000.

Our 2019 session tracks will include: