Fireside Chat: R In Industry Discussion


About the speakers

Technologist and Data Scientist driven to create software that people use, find useful, and pleasant. From programming through architecture, from green field to maintenance, software is interesting technologically, socially, and intellectually. I enjoy contributing to the process, either through leadership or individual effort, of creating software that is deployed joyfully and is as bug free as possible

Tanya Cashorali is the founding partner of TCB Analytics, a Boston-based data consultancy. Previously, she worked as a data scientist at Biogen. Tanya started her career in bioinformatics and has applied her experience to other data-rich verticals such as telecom, finance, and sports. She brings over 10 years of experience using R in data scientist roles as well as managing and training data analysts, and she’s helped grow a handful of Boston startups.

Eric Colson is the Chief Algorithms Officer at Stitch Fix, where he specializes in social algorithms. He is also an advisor at Earnest (consumer lending), Data Elite (Big Data incubator), and Mortar Data (Big Data Platform). Previously, he was VP of Data Science & Engineering at Netflix and has held analytical positions at Yahoo!, Blue Martini, Proxicom and Information Resources. He holds a B.A. in Economics (SFSU), a M.S. in Information Systems (GGU), and a M.S. in Management Science & Engineering (Stanford).

Elaine McVey
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VP of Data Science at The Looma Project

Elaine works at the intersection of data science and business, leading the company to take full advantage of data as part of their analytics-driven, film-based storytelling platform. This includes data strategy, data infrastructure, reporting, and delivery of predictive analytics.

David is the Chief Data Scientist at DataCamp, an education company for teaching data science through interactive online courses. His interests include statistics, data analysis, education, and programming in R.

David is co-author with Julia Silge of the tidytext package and the O’Reilly book Text Mining with R. He also the author of the broom, gganimate, and fuzzyjoin packages, and of the e-book Introduction to Empirical Bayes.

David previously worked as a data scientist at Stack Overflow, and received a PhD in Quantitative and Computational Biology from Princeton University.

Tareef Kawaf is a software startup executive and current president of RStudio, Inc., a Massachusetts-based company that develops both open-source and commercial software for the R statistical programming language. Prior to joining RStudio, Mr. Kawaf served as senior vice president of engineering and operations at Brightcove, Inc.. Over 8 years he helped Brightcove build and operate the second largest online video platform, helping it grow from $0 to $92M in revenue, and complete its initial public offering (IPO). Mr. Kawaf jointly holds a patent for the “Method and System for Dynamic Pricing,” issued in 2001 which is a core component of Oracle’s ATG Commerce solutions and helps retailers define sophisticated rules for couponing, discounting, and personalized commerce. Mr. Kawaf received his B.S. degree in Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1994. He and his family currently reside outside of Boston, MA.