At Data Jawn, 12 speakers will share a peek into the local data community

When a handful of Philly data scientists and technologists got together to revive Data Jawn — the Philly-centric data analytics event series last held in 2015 — people’s hype rubbed off on the organizing team.

“Philly seems ripe for a conference like this,” said Joey Davidson, coorganizer of Data Jawn alongside data scientists from a handful of Philly companies like CompassRed, Stitch, Fishtown Analytics and others. After partnering with Meetup group Data Philly in a push to find a diverse lineup of participants, organizers announced the lineup of speakers, with representation from large pharma and telecommunication companies as well as small startups and nonprofits.

Here’s who will take the mic on June 13 at the Science History Institute:

• Vicki Boykis, Manager, Engineering and Data Science at CapTech Ventures
• Michael Draugelis, Chief Data Scientist at Penn Medicine
• Ben Garvey, Engineering Manager at Magento Business Intelligence
• Randy Zwitch, Senior Developer Advocate at MapD
• Bonnie Kruft, R&D Manager, Data Science Enablement at GSK
• Sam Chenkin, Director of Consulting Services – IT Services at TechImpact
• Corey Chivers, Senior Data Scientist at Penn Medicine
• Sridhar Alla, Big Data Architect & Engineer at Comcast
• Andrew Pawloski, Senior Software Engineer at Element84
• Rosa Torres, President and Social Data Engineer at Data Imprint
• Bruce Marable, CEO of Employee Cycle
• Elea McDonnell, Feit Assistant Professor of Marketing at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business

We asked Davidson what the search process taught the team about the local data science community:

“There’s a genuine passion for data in Philly,” the Technical.ly Delaware alum said. “We had more than 30 quality submissions to comb through before we arrived at our final list. We also found a diverse lineup of people wanting to speak, and Dan and I have been honored to assemble this varied group of people from a bunch of backgrounds and unique perspectives.”

In 2015, the keynote talk was delivered by Azavea founder Robert Cheetham, who made a rousing call for government to put open data to use, “not just releasing it.”