Data Visualization @ Yahoo!: Data Science and Business Perspectives

This month we are very excited to have two great speakers from Yahoo! Research present to our group.  Ling Huang, data scientist, will present on data-driven exploration and visualization-based analysis, and Kira Roytburg, Director of Analytics, will discuss the business side of the data analysis project.

About the Talk

In recent years online display advertising is growing at a rapid pace. Genome from Yahoo! is the big data buying solution for online display advertising. The goal of our platform is to identify the best opportunities to display an ad to a user who is then most likely to take a desired action. Our system contains websites which are visited by several million users per day. The number of variables related to the user events are also of the order of several thousand. Visual analysis has emerged as a powerful technique to facilitate demonstrating data overview, exploiting data details, identifying data analysis tasks, evaluating analysis results and monitoring system outputs. With respect to large-scale online data in our system, the talk presents the data-driven visual analysis platform at Genome from Yahoo!.

About the Speakers

Kira Roytburg is a Director of Analytics at Genome from Yahoo! working with a team focusing on user behavioral ad targeting and advertiser focused analytics with big data. Kira has been with Yahoo for 4 years and came through Yahoo’s acquisition of an ad technology company called interclick. Prior to Yahoo, Kira was building algorithms that dynamically optimize site experiences of fortune 500 clients at a company with a geeky name [X+1]. Kira holds Masters in Statistics from Columbia University. Here at Yahoo, she has fun working on many R&D data initiatives connecting millions of diverse data sources to create a holistic experience for the user.

Ling Huang is a Data Scientist at Genome from Yahoo! Ling received her PhD in Statistics from Iowa State University and worked on various types of predictive analysis projects over 5 years. At Yahoo, Ling works on understanding user behavior online and incorporating it into advertising models that help create a better site and ad experience for Yahoo audience. Ling loves to use visual analysis to demonstrate data overviews, exploit data details, develop machine learning models and tell stories of big data.

About the Event

As usual, we’ll start refreshments at 6:30pm with time to meet, network, catch up and meet new people with interests in data visualization.  The formal presentations will begin around 7:00pm and there will be time for Q&A afterwards.  So please join us for these excellent presentations, the best DataViz networking in New York, and some light refreshments.

Please note: only those with confirmed RSVP’s will be able to attend, because of security requirements at the space that generously hosts & sponsors us. Reservations close at 5:00pm. If you aren’t able to get a slot by then, we apologize, but you won’t be able to enter the building. For this reason, we’ve expanded the number of RSVP’s we accept, to account for no-shows and to make sure we fill as many of our seats as possible. Thanks for understanding, and see you there!

-Paul & Christian