L.A. Controller

Ron Galperin is the independently elected Controller of the City of Los Angeles. He serves as the watchdog for taxpayers at City Hall, making sure public dollars are spent efficiently and effectively. Galperin oversees a team that audits municipal departments and programs, manages payroll and spending, reports on the City’s finances, pursues fraud and waste, and works to create a more transparent, accountable, equitable and modern government for everyone. Galperin launched ControlPanel LA, the City’s first open data portal, in 2013. During the pandemic, he created the L.A. Equity Index to help address local barriers to opportunity and released a series of resource maps and financial dashboards to aid businesses and residents. Read more about him here.

Chief Data and Analytics Officer at RepairSmith.com

Alison is a career data scientist with more than 25 years of experience spanning large companies, agencies, and start-ups. Prior to joining RepairSmith, Alison served as a data science consultant for a variety of retail and technology clients, and was the Chief Data Scientist for Emotely, a social network startup.

Vice President, Enterprise Information Management at Ultra Mobile, Inc.

Career data professional working in government (US Air Force), Fortune 50 (Toyota), and a start-up that has grown exponentially (Ultra). Each experience has contributed to a broad understanding of the value of data, the value of innovation, and, most importantly, the value to be learned from all of our peers in the data universe.

CEO at Spokeo

Harrison is Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Spokeo. He started Spokeo with his college roommates Mike Daly (CTO) and Eric Liang (CIO) in 2006 in his parents basement in 2006. and serves as Spokeo's Chief Executive Officer. Harrison guides Spokeo's product vision to build an experienced team that helps the company realize its mission of making the world around us more transparent. Under his leadership, He Harrison has helped build and scale Spokeo ’s user base from zero to serving tens of millions of users. He is passionate about building products that help customers get their jobs done. Harrison earned a B.A.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Economics and a M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.

Chief Data Officer at System1

Nathan is Chief Data Officer at System1, where he has built and developed the core team that leads optimization strategy and implementation for the company. He has worked on technology and modeling for both online and offline marketing and advertising for over 16 years. His current focus is in the automation and optimization of end-to-end, full funnel, customized advertising experiences.

Chief Data Scientist at Tatari

Mike Swinson, Co-Founder and Chief Data Scientist at Tatari, a cutting-edge streaming video and TV ad tech platform. Mike has applied data science over the years in a wide range of disciplines, from engineering to fraud detection and has worked as the lead Quant at a boutique hedge fund as well as serving as Chief Data Scientist at TrueCar, leading both the R&D and marketing analytics efforts to help take that company public in 2014. He has been issued 49 US patents in computational algorithm design.  

Executive Director / Founder at LA Tech4Good

Karen is creator and Executive Director of LA Tech4Good, a nonprofit startup at the intersection of social impact and technology. She is compelled to create space for people to engage in battles raging over tech and society, and to move the needle on tech as a force for social change in our times. Her career path has ranged across digital transformations in publishing and printing, from Hollywood to nonprofit, and now focuses on expanding the breadth and depth of “tech for good.”

Principal Developer Advocate, AI and Machine Learning at AWS

Chris Fregly is a Principal Developer Advocate for AI and Machine Learning at Amazon Web Services (AWS) based in San Francisco, California. He is co-author of the O'Reilly Book, "Data Science on AWS."

CEO & Co-Founder at Nexleaf

Nithya Ramanathan is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Nexleaf Analytics, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving human life and protecting our planet by designing sensor technologies, generating data analytics, and advocating for data-driven solutions to global challenges. Nexleaf's IoT tech monitors and protects the vaccine supply for ~1 in 10 babies annually born on Earth. Nithya is a PopTech Social Innovation Fellow, TED Fellow, and winner of the Tallberg Global Leadership prize.

Chief Executive Officer at Kurlon Enterprise Limited 

After completing her BE in Electronics and Communication from Manipal Institute of Technology, Jyothi got her MS in Engineering Management from University of Southern California, Los Angeles. In the last 15 years, Jyothi worked in multinational companies in Engineering, Marketing and Leadership roles- but realised that her true affinity was being an entrepreneur. Jyothi then got her MBA in Innovation and Entrepreneurship from University of California, Irvine and has returned to India in 2019 to join her family business.

Head of Data Product & Experimentation at Yelp

Eric is currently the Head of Experimentation, Economic Insights and Metrics at Yelp. He also advises and teaches at Product Faculty and Propulsion Academy, after teaching for years in academia. He has worked in senior leadership and individual contributor roles at Yelp, LinkedIn and CoreLogic after an academic career as an assistant professor. He loves working with data, educating others about data's value and helping people excel in technical roles.

Partner at TenOneTen Ventures

Gil is an accomplished entrepreneur and pioneer of natural language technology and structured data ecosystems. In 1991, Gil earned his bachelor’s degree from Caltech, with a double major in Engineering/Applied Science and Economics. In 1998, he co-founded Applied Semantics (ASI). The company was acquired by Google in 2003, at which point Gil became Director of Engineering for the Santa Monica office. In 2007, Gil left Google to start Los Angeles-based Factual Inc., an open data platform founded to maximize data accuracy, transparency, and availability.

Principal Data Scientist Manager at Microsoft

Francesca Lazzeri, PhD is an experienced scientist and machine learning practitioner with over 12 years of both academic and industry experience. She is author of the book “Machine Learning for Time Series Forecasting with Python” (Wiley) and many other publications, including technology journals and conferences. Francesca is Adjunct Professor of AI and machine learning at Columbia University and Principal Cloud Advocate Manager at Microsoft, where she leads a large international team (across USA, Canada, UK and Russia) of engineers and cloud AI developer advocates, managing a large portfolio of customers in the research and academic sector and building intelligent automated solutions on the cloud. Before joining Microsoft, she was a research fellow at Harvard University in the Technology and Operations Management Unit. She is also on the advisory board of Women in Data Science (WiDS) initiative, machine learning mentor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and active member of the AI community. You can find her on Twitter: @frlazzeri and Medium: https://medium.com/@francescalazzeri