Announcing the Special Guest Speakers for Brighton & Atlanta BI Forum 2015
As well as a great line-up of speakers and sessions at each of the Brighton & Atlanta Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015 events in May, I’m very pleased to announce our two guest speakers who’ll give the second keynotes, on the Thursday evening of the two events just before we leave for the restaurant and the appreciation events. This year our special guest speaker in Atlanta is John Foreman, Chief Data Scientist at MailChimp and author of the book “Data Smart: Using Data Science to Transform Information into Insight”; and in Brighton we’re delighted to have Reiner Zimmerman, Senior Director of Product Management at Oracle US and the person behind the Oracle DW & Big Data Global Leaders program.
I first came across John Foreman when somebody recommended his book to me, “Data Smart”, a year or so ago. At that time Rittman Mead were getting more-and-more requests from our customers asking us to help with their advanced analytics and predictive modelings needs, and I was looking around for resources to help myself and the team get to grips with some of the more advanced modelings and statistical techniques Oracle’s tools now support - techniques such as clustering and pattern matching, linear regression and genetic algorithms.
One of the challenges when learning these sorts of techniques is not getting to caught up in the tools and technology - R was our favoured technology at the time, and there’s lots to it - so John’s book was particularly well-timed as it goes through these types of “data science” techniques but focuses on Microsoft Excel as the analysis tool, with simple examples and a very readable style.
Back in his day job, John is Chief Data Scientist at MailChimp and has become a particularly in-demand speaker following the success of his book, and I was very excited to hear from Charles Elliott, our Practice Manager for Rittman Mead America, that he lived near John in Atlanta and had arranged for him to keynote at our Atlanta BI Forum event. His Keynote will be entitled "How Mailchimp used qualitative and quantitative analysis to build their next product” and we’re very much looking forward to meeting him at our event in Atlanta on May 13th-15th 2015.
Our second keynote speaker at the Brighton Rittman Mead BI Forum 2015 event is non-other than Reiner Zimmerman, best known in EMEA for organising the Oracle DW Global Leaders Program. We’ve known Reiner for several years now as Rittman Mead are one of the associate sponsors for the program, which aims to bring together the leading organizations building data warehouse and big data systems on the Oracle Engineered Systems platform.
A bit like the BI Forum (but even more exclusive), the DW Global Leaders program holds meetings in the US, EMEA and AsiaPac over the year and is a fantastic networking and knowledge-sharing group for an exclusive set of customers putting together the most cutting-edge DW and big data systems on the latest Oracle technology. Reiner’s also an excellent speaker and a past visitor to the BI Forum, and his session entitled “Hadoop and Oracle BDA customer cases from around the world” will be a look at what customers are really doing, and the value they’re getting, from building big data systems on the Oracle platform.
Registration is now open for both the Brighton and Atlanta BI Forum 2015 events, with full details including the speaker line-up and how to register on the event website. Keep an eye on the blog for more details of both events later this week including more on the masterclass by myself and Jordan Meyer, and a data visualisation “bake-off” we’re going to run on the second day of each event. Watch this space…!