Join fellow alumni for our Booth Big Data event, a night that promises to be very fun and informative. We hope to break our RSVP record of 63 recently set at the Fusion event.
Event Details
Everyone knew that Seattle was a tech-town sporting a number of homegrown heavyweights such as Microsoft, Amazon.com, Expedia, T-Mobile, Zillow and Tableau with a combined market capitalization of roughly $650 billion.
But, who knew that nearly 50 out-of-town tech firms have set-up development offices in Seattle over the last several years including Apple, Alibaba, Facebook, Groupon, Salesforce and Splunk, just to name a few, not to mention a plethora of local tech start-ups including notables ones such as ExtraHop Networks, Apptio, iSpot.tv, Context Relevant, Dato.com, Jobaline.com, Qumolo, and SpaceCurve et al.
Although some have termed this trend as the Invasion of the Silicon Valley Dev Snatchers!, upon a closer examination one will notice that nearly all of these firms share a common relationship with Big Data, whether producing it, consuming it or analyzing it. New terms like Data Scientist/Engineer, Chief Data Officer, data exhaust and data lake/swamp have sprung up around Big Data. Both Amazon and Microsoft have launched competing products to manage Big Data in the cloud, or should we really say in server farms powered by cheap and ample electricity from the Columbia River. According to Google Trends, the term Data Scientist only came into existence a scant five years ago and now the phrase garners roughly 100 headlines per month globally. In the Seattle job market alone, at least one and often several new jobs are posted daily for roles relating to Big Data.
Within this backdrop, we thought that it was high-time to provide a Booth perspective on this new sector of the economy, which is clearly flourishing in Seattle. As such, we have assembled a panel of four leading alumni in the Big Data space along with one very notable non-Boother. We guarantee that the discussions will be lively and certainly not devoid of biases whether relating to hardware, software, best practices and even ethics... yes, the "creep factor" is becoming a hot topic in the world of Big Data space (e.g. Uber and Starwood tie-up). Our panel will consist of:
- Ruth Chew, '17, Amazon Intern; former data science consultant at Freakonomics, Steven Leavitt's firm based in Chicago and London.
- Xing Quan, '10, Director of Product Management at Qubole and an early employee in Amazon Web Services (AWS).
- Swatee Surve, '04, Litesprite Founder & CEO, is a leader who has developed and launched technology-based healthcare businesses for Microsoft, Nike, T-Mobile, Premera Blue Cross, and Eastman Kodak.
- Milan Lathia, '12, Chief of Staff at Bing UX and Relevance Org and am engineer with Bing since the founding days.
- Mario Faria, Research Director at Gartner and one of the first named Chief Data Officers globally.
- Nick Waltner, '90, DataWalt.io founder, Seattle Club President, and confessed data geek will moderate the discussion and provide an overview of the big data landscape locally.
RSVP today to secure your spot. We hope to see you for a fun and informative evening!
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$20/person; includes appetizers and drinks