Program

Tentative Program

8:30 – 9:15 Registration and Breakfast

9:15 – 9:30 Opening Remarks by the organizers

9:30 – 10:00 Microsoft

10:00 – 10:30 Cisco

10:30 – 10:45 Break

10:45 – 11:00 MITACS

11:00 – 11:30 EA Sports

11:30 – 12:00 Speed networking session

12:30 -1:30 Lunch with Dr. Frank Maurer (professor at UofCalgary and Co-founder and CTO of Vizworx)

1:30 – 2:00 Dr. Scott Hopkins (professor at Uof Waterloo- Co-founder of Watermine)

2:00 – 2:15 2Hat (Tentative)

2:15 – 2:30 PayByPhone

2:30 – 2:45 Dr. John W. Braun, Head CMPS, Head Data Science MMRI, UBC-Okanagan

2:45 – 3:15 Break and Networking.

Industry Speakers (Updating...)

Dr. Frank Maurer (Keynote Speaker)

Title: Academic-industry partnerships – the good, the bad, the ugly

Dr. Frank Maurer is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Calgary. His research focuses on engineering immersive analytics applications, combining machine learning, extended reality, and agile software development. He currently serves as the Associate Dean, Innovation and Strategic Partnerships at the Faculty of Science. Dr. Maurer is a co-founder of VizworX, a Calgary-based custom solutions company focusing on AR/VR, machine learning and mobile/web technologies. VizworX recently received the Innovation Award from the Calgary Chamber as the fastest growing innovation company in Calgary.

Maxine Chan and Raoufeh Hashemian (CISCO)

Title: "The Journey to a Trillion Messages ..."

Maxine Chan is a software developer that has worked in various industries with large scale data needs. She holds bachelor degrees from the University of Alberta in Computing Science and Math. Her primary focus is to create systems that function under high load. She currently leads the Data team at Cisco’s Advanced Malware Protection group.

Raoufeh Hashemian is a software quality analyst at Cisco Advance Malware Protection (AMP) and PhD candidate at the University of Calgary. She has a B.Sc. (2008) in Electrical Engineering from Isfahan University of Technology, Iran and M.Sc.(2011) in Software Engineering from the University of Calgary. Her research and work experiences are in the area of performance and scalability evaluation of large scale distributed software systems.

Maxine and Raoufeh are currently part of AMP Data Team at Cisco where their mission is to develop fast, stable and secure big data systems delivering research intel for cyber security analysts to protect people.

Srikanth Kirsh (PaybyPhone)

Title: Monitoring Data to Build Distributed Systems at Scale

Srikanth Kirsh is a software development manager at PayByPhone (https://www.paybyphone.com/ ) - worlds leading mobile parking app, owned by Volkswagen. Srikanth specializes in building software systems at scale and currently leading the core payments team. He also has experience in building distributed systems in digital marketing and health care platforms in the past. Srikanth received his Master's degree in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Manitoba.

Dr. Arash Niknafs (EA Sports)

Title: "Data Science for Better Player Experience: A glimpse of how data science is contributing in game industry"

Dr. Arash Niknafs joined the data team in Electronic Arts in 2015 after graduating from the University of Calgary with a PhD in Computer Science where his research was about applications of Artificial Intelligence in Operations Research. His passion about data and AI sciences started growing in 2007 when he read the book "The Third Wave" by Alvin Toffler. Since then, he has worked with dynamic evolutionary algorithms, deep learning, collaborative filtering, and multi-criteria decision making methods in problem spaces such as e-commerce, management, security, education, and software feature design and engineering.

Mr. Kapil Mathur (Microsoft)

Title: A software Engineer’s adventures with Big data

Kapil Mathur is a software engineering manager at Microsoft and leads a team focusing on data analytics and growth. He started in Microsoft in 2005 as a software Engineer and eventually jumped into the world of big data gaining experience on building scalable data pipelines, leading a team of data scientists and analysts making sense of that data and applying the learnings towards product growth.