Data Jawn speakers will look at city budget, opioid crisis through the lens of data

For a look at the regional state of data analytics, have a quick look at the lineup for this year’s Data Jawn, where speakers from both the public and private sectors will showcase notable applications of data science.

The keynote speaker at this year’s Philly-centric data analytics summit will be Lia Pizzicato, a substance use epidemiologist for the City of Philadelphia, who will present on the ways the city is leveraging data to better understand the opioid epidemic in the city.

Ten additional presentations will run the gamut from career pathing in the data science world to a breakdown of the City’s annual budget or the intersection of data science and the nonprofit world.

“Philadelphia has a vibrant and growing population of data professionals and data enthusiasts,” said co-organizer Alice Walsh, from the Philadelphia chapter of R-Ladies Global, a gender-diversity-focused group in the R and data science communities. “I hope that this years DataJawn will bring different people together. It’s a unique opportunity to hear about the wide array of exciting projects and data careers here in Philadelphia.”

Have a look at the lineup of speakers (and talks) happening June 12 at the Science History Institute:

• Marieke Jackson — Non-Profits and Data Systems: A Case Study
• Kevin Minkus — Distant Reading SpongeBob SquarePants
• Michael Becker — Making a Career in Data Science
• Joey Logan and Stephanie Sullivan — Data Science and Congressional Apportionment
• Christina Blake — Scaling Audience Research with Data Visualization
• Sharath Bennur — Productization of Machine Learning
• Kiana Montazeri — Genre classification Based on Mel-Frequency IFT Coefficients of Audio Signal
• Ben Garvey — HOWTO: Spend $4.2 Billion in Philadelphia
• Jena Vint — The Journey to Becoming a Data Scientist
• Greg Dobler — Better Cities through Imaging

Data Jawn began in 2015 as a gathering of area data science enthusiasts, with former Center City startup RJMetrics playing host. After a few years’ hiatus, it returned in 2018 as a joint effort of local startups and data science enthusiasts. This year, CompassRed, DataPhilly, Code for Philly and R-Ladies are banding together to make the event happen.

“We are continuing to focus on highlighting the vastness of data work in Philadelphia,” said co-organizer Daniel Larson. “We have selected speakers across a variety of industries including healthcare, marketing, urban development, and politics. We have added lighting talks, with the goal to encourage submissions from less seasoned data professionals and provide the opportunity for them to share their work with the community.”

Among other things, at last year’s Data Jawn we learned that Philly Twitter is negative, but not most negative, thanks to a sentiment analysis by developer and data scientist Ben Garvey.