We’ve been invited to an event by the MIT Club of Utah. On Thursday, 9/28, the club will be hosting a dinner and data science talk with Jeff Phillips, an Associate Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. Here’s a synopsis of the talk:

Please join us on Thursday, 9/28 for dinner and a discussion of Data Science led by Associate Professor Jeff Phillips from the University of Utah!

Data Science pervades our lives. It already:
• Stops credit card fraud, performs credit scoring, and detects money laundering
• Detects spam, malware, and network intrusions
• Selects and recommends online products, movies, and web page ads, direct-mail recipients, and retail store locations
• Produces best Internet search results and selects most profitable web page ads
• Selects most cost-effective airline flight and goods delivery routes
• Predicts equipment failures, strokes, and network outages
• Recognizes faces, speech, and handwriting
• Improves video game performance as the user plays

Data Science represents the intersection of data modeling, artificial intelligence, and statistics applied to predict future events. The availability of vast amounts of data, storage, communications bandwidth, and CPU power have made it possible for Data Science to extract useful information from historical facts to guide decisions. Data Science uses Machine Learning algorithms to identify models of patterns or trends of relationships between data factors and predicted outcomes.

There are various factors affecting the speed at which datasets can be processed: the amount of data, the number of irrelevant features, and slow prediction algorithms. Coresets and sketches provide a special technique for compressing large amounts of data without reducing the accuracy of predictions. Algorithms run much more efficiently and can run on a much smaller computer, such as your laptop or cell phone (can scale from thousands of data points to millions of data) without loss of accuracy. Also discussed will be how Data Science is evolving and challenges it will be engaging in the near future.

RSVP so we order enough food! (see note below)

Jeff Phillips:
Our speaker, Jeff Phillips, is an Associate Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah, one of the Universities attempting to develop a Data Science core competancy. He is Director and is co-organizer of The Data Group, director of Data Management and Analysis Track, and curator of Data Science. He got his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science at Rice University in 2003 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Duke University in 2009. He has research experience at Yahoo! Research as a Research Intern in 2007, AT&T Research as a Visiting Researcher in 2005), and The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory as a Research Scientist from 2002 to 2003.

Fellowships and Awards include the NSF CAREER Award in 2014, CCC-CRA-NSF Computing Innovation Fellowship in 2009, at Duke Computer Science department the Distinguished Department Service Award in 2008 and the Outstanding Department Service Award in 2006, NSF Graduate Research Fellowship from 2004 to 2007, James B. Duke Fellowship from 2003 to 2007, and a C. S. Draper Laboratory Fellowship from 2003 to 2007.

He has a substantial number of conference and journal publications, including on the topic of Coresets and Sketches on which you will hear tonight.

The event registration page has time and location details, as well as contact information. Note that the registration process currently requires MIT alumni credentials—so if you are interested in attending but unable to register, please contact Vicky Thomas, Todd Kushner or myself, and we will sort things out!