Each month at RTP 180 we do our best to keep the lineup fresh and interesting. All of us here at RTP HQ like to think of ourselves as a fairly bright bunch, but the topic of Big Data made all of us scratch our heads a little bit.
“So they just analyze numbers? Isn’t that a business analyst?”
“What are they doing with all those email address anyway?”
“I think there’s something about V’s…”
We know big data is only going to keep playing a larger role in society, and while it wasn’t our strong suit, all of us on the team were determined to put together a RTP: 180 that showcased the diversity within the field. I think we achieved that judging by the different sounding speakers we have lined up. With that, let’s get to know them before the show:
Rebecca Tippett is Director of Carolina Demography at the Carolina Population Center at UNC-Chapel Hill. She works with US Census and other data in an effort to understand and explain the impact of demographic and social trends to community organizations, policy makers, business leaders throughout the state.
Today, Vivek Ranjan works for Metlife as a software development engineer specializing in big data analytics. Previously, he was a computational physicist with several years of experience in working with high performance simulations.
Hye-Chung Kum is a data scientist cross trained in computer science and the social sciences. She founded and currently leads the Population Informatics Research Group jointly housed at TAMHSC and UNC-CH. The organization brings together computer scientists, social scientists, and health service researchers to answer critical questions in social, behavioral, economic, and health sciences using preexisting data points.
Bryce Gartner is all about data (and movie quotes). He gets organizations beyond the big data buzzword and puts their data to work in his role as the CEO of icimo.
Working as the executive vice president of Social, Statistical, and Environmental Sciences (SSES) for RTI International, Tim J. Gabel is helping to guide RTI’s Big Data strategy. As head of SSES, the largest of RTI’s business units, Gabel manages an annual revenue of approximately $400M and more than 1,500 professional staff.
Blair D. Sullivan is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at North Carolina State University. In her role she works to bring bringing structural graph theory and algorithms to the masses. (Ed. Visualization!) She has previously toiled under the auspices of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Princeton University, and Georgia Tech.
If you can’t make it out Thursday evening, or weren’t able to snag tickets, tune into our livestream! It will be going strong starting at 6pm over at RTP 180!
Our next RTP: 180 will be September 18th and the topic is Health.20. After our first health RTP 180 got such a great reception, we decided to have another one. We hope you’ll join us!