Event space sponsored by Pricewaterhouse Coopers; food and refreshments sponsored by Cloudera

Event agenda:

6:30 - 7:00 PM: Networking

7:00 - 8:30 PM: Keynote talk byJuliet Hougland

8:30 - 9:00 PM: Socializing

Is our software any good?

Is our work on it making it better or worse?

Can we quantify how much it has changed?

Engineering organizations face these questions constantly and know there are not any easy answers. Luckily, we can draw on well-known risk assessment techniques from epidemiologists and actuaries. We will explore the historical development of these ideas from studying the effects of smoking to setting maritime cargo insurance rates in Babylon, ancient Greece, and Victorian England. This talk will focus on how Cloudera measures and compares quality of our software.

A useful as observational methods of risk assessment are, they are also easy to misuse and misinterpret. We will discuss some choice examples of misuse and abuse of analytic methods, with examples from Newtons Principia to particle physicists, and hopefully avoid our own charlatanry in the future.

Juliet Hougland answers complex business problems using statistics to tame multi-terabyte datasets. She succeeds in applying and explaining the results of mathematical models across a variety of industries including Software, Industrial Energy, Retail and Consumer Packaged Goods. Juliet is currently the Head of Data Science, Engineering at Cloudera where she focuses on using data to help engineering build high-quality products. Juliet's been sought after by Clouderas customers as a field-facing data scientist advising on which tools to use, teaching how to use them, recommending the best approach to bring together the right data to answer the business problem at hand and building production machine learning models. For many years Juliet has been a contributor in the open source community working on projects such as Apache Spark, Scalding, and Kiji. Juliet holds an MS in Applied Mathematics from University of Colorado, Boulder and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Reed College with a BA in Math-Physics.