Host: XO Group

"We build applications thatinspire, inform and cheer our users through our brands: The Knot, The Nest and The Bump, as they move through lifes most amazing (and stressful!) milestones. From the marriage proposal to creating a home and starting a family together, were there for every step of the journey. We use Ruby, Rails, Swift, and many other languages and technologies with cleverness that is required at our scale and speed of feature development"

Guest Speaker: Suzanne Carroll leads technical product design for XO Group's Data Intelligence team. She designs and manages our data curation tool which manually cleans, curates, and collects data in an effort to increase effectiveness of our data science projects.In addition,Suzanne manages the taxonomy team who build classification schemas supporting content tagging across all front-end products.Earlier in her career, Suzanne designed and implemented taxonomy and metadata schemas as a consultant; managed the knowledge management system for an international development firm; and taught computer literacy in West Africa with the Peace Corps.

Description:

Interested in learning more about Data Science and Big Data but not sure how to get started? Join us in this workshop where we will introduce you to Apache Spark, an open source tool used in data processing. We'll get you started with installing Spark on your own computer and then walk you through the Hello World of the Big Data world: the word count example - count the number of words in a large text file. Beginners are welcome - just bring yourself and a computer.

Instructors:

Keira Zhou is a Data Engineer at Capital One Labs. She was formerly an Insight Data Engineering Fellow. As part of the platform team, Keira's work ranges from setting up pipelines for ETL processes to benchmarking databases to support machine learning and data visualization projects. She is an active volunteer in the community for Women in Data and Engineering.

Jiaqi Liu is a Data Scientist at Capital One Labs. As part of the consumer product team, Jiaqi works on a variety of projects leveraging big data and machine learning. She frequently mentors at Hackathons and is also an organizer for Women in Data, a community for Women in Data Driven Careers.