STF Annual Event & CIE Annual Convention: Data Driven Practice

* What: STF Annual Event & CIE Annual Convention: Data Driven Practice
* When: Sat, Sept 13th, 2014 1:00 -- 5:00 PM
* Where: Bellevue Westin Hotel
* Co-host: CIE (http://www.cie-sea.org/)
* Admission: Registration required
* Parking: Free at nearby Bellevue Square Mall
* Dressing Code: Business Casual
* RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/Sea-Tech-Forum/events/190775682/

We are expecting about 300 high profile people from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Boeing, Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, Ebay, Intel, IBM, HP, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, HTC, Hulu, Groupon, Oracle, SAP, CA, EMC, Expedia, Tableau, Zillow, SEOmoz, Bungie, Nintendo, Disney, Nordstrom, Costco, Alaska Airlines, Dice, Salesforce, SGI, VMWare, Citrix, UW, City University, Seattle University, LWIT, Puget Sound Energy...

===Tentative Agenda =====

1 - 1:30pm Registration and Social

1:30 - 2pm Talk
Data Driven Application Development
Wanghong Yuan, Staff Software Engineer Lead, Google

2 - 2:30pm Talk
Statistical contributions to data driven business  
Li Qin, Principal Data Scientist, Nordstrom

2:30 - 3pm Talk
Learnings from big data in advertising
JC Mao, Partner Dev Manager/Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft Ads

3 - 4:30pm Panel Discussion and Q&A

MC: Weiling Li, CEO, UMetis

Panelists:
• JC Mao, Partner Dev Manager/Distinguished Engineer, Microsoft Ads
Jianchang (JC) Mao is a Distinguished Engineer & Head of Bing Ads Marketplace Development in the Applications and Services Group at Microsoft, responsible for R&D of technologies that power Bing Ads Marketplaces. He joined Microsoft in April 2012. Previously, Mao was Vice President and Head of Advertising Sciences at Yahoo! Labs, overseeing the R&D of advertising technologies. He was also the Science/Engineering Director responsible for the development of back-end technologies for several Yahoo! social search products including Yahoo! Answers. Prior to joining Yahoo!, Mao was Director of Emerging Technologies and Principal Architect at Verity Inc., a leader in enterprise search, from 2000 to 2004. Prior to this, he was a research staff member at the IBM Almaden Research Center from 1994 to 2000, after receiving his PhD degree in computer science from Michigan State University in 1994. Mao is an IEEE Fellow.

• Peter Huang, GM, Marketing Technology, Nordstrom
Peter Huang is the Group Manager of Enterprise Marketing Technology at Nordstrom. Peter has extensive experience in delivering data-centric solutions and technologies. Peter has been an adjunct professor at Seattle University, Strayer University and University of Richmond. He designed and taught undergraduate and graduate level courses on MIS, decision support & data warehousing, ERP, enterprise architecture, research methods & statistics, and agile project management. Peter also co-founded Greater Seattle Informatica User Group in 2008 and has served as its Chairperson since.

• Zijian Zheng, Partner Dev Manager, Microsoft Data Mining
Dr. Zijian Zheng joined Microsoft in 2003. Currently, he is Partner Development Manager of the Data Mining team in Information Platform Group. He created the DM team inside Bing from scratch in 2005 and now the team serves broader organizations including Bing, ICE, and Office. Zheng received a bachelor of engineering and master of engineering in computer science from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1984 and 1987, and then a computer science PhD in machine learning from University of Sydney in 1996. He worked for three years as a senior research fellow at Deakin University in Australia, in the areas of machine learning and data mining. In 1999, Zheng moved to industry. He worked at Blue Martini Software and Amazon.com. In addition to data mining development and practice, Zheng is very active in research. He has six patents and nine pending patent applications. He has published more than 30 papers in international journals and conferences in the areas of machine learning, data mining, and artificial intelligence. He has been serving program committees of the key international conferences in areas including ACM SIGKDD, WWW, ICDM, and WSDM.

• Hong Zhang, Staff Eng Manager, Google
• Wanghong Yuan, Staff Software Engineer Lead, Google

• Lan Wang, Senior Manager, EMC
As a Senior Manager at EMC, Lan Wang is responsible for running the Presales Systems Engineering organization, which supports a $1.5B business in Western US. With revenues of $23 billion in 2013 and 65,000 people worldwide, EMC is a global leader in enabling businesses and service providers to transform their operations and deliver IT as a service. Fundamental to this transformation is cloud computing. Through innovative products and services, EMC accelerates the journey to cloud computing, helping IT departments to store, manage, protect and analyze their most valuable asset—information—in a more agile, trusted and cost-efficient way.
Prior to EMC, Lan worked at Compaq, Rand and United Technologies, where he had wide exposure to various computing platforms. Lan holds a Master’s degree in Industrial Engineering from North Carolina University, and bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Southeast University in China.

• Li Qin, Principal Data Scientist, Nordstrom
Trained as a Statistician, Li has applied her data analytic skills in various areas including marketing, biomedical research and online retail business.   After getting her PhD from Upenn, Li spent 10 years developing new models, algorithms, providing novel analytic solutions.  Li’s technical expertise include predictive modeling, design of experiment, significance testing, sampling, machine learning, and data mining over large scale, high dimensional, time series and time to event data.

• Junhua Wang, Principal Dev Manager, Microsoft Search
Junhua Wang is one of the early members of Microsoft Bing team.  He leads and manages an agile and high performance engineering organization that is responsible for various projects of advanced internet search engine technologies at Bing.  He is specialized in internet search platform, geo-distributed data center infrastructure, large scale cloud computing, real-time search, multimedia search, and web search quality.  Prior to Bing he has worked on database and network communication products.  He holds a MSc in Computer Science from New York University, and Dual BSc in Computer Science and Economics from University of Science and Technology of China.

• Kevin Yu, Co-founder & CTO, Socedo Inc
Kevin Yu is co-founder and CTO of Socedo Inc., a social leadgen startup in Seattle. His primary interests include product innovation, Cloud Computing, Big Data and entrepreneurship in the area of disruptive new technologies.  Prior to founding Socedo, Kevin spent twelve years at Microsoft product group and helped ship SQL Server, BizTalk Server, Office and Visual Studio.  Kevin holds a Bachelor degree in Computer Science, and a MBA from University of Washington.  He can be reached at [email protected].

4:30 - 5:00pm Social