Speakers

Co-author Data Wrangling with Python for O'reilly Media and Data Scientist

Katharine Jarmul is a pythonista and data lover. She recently co-authored an O\'Reilly book Data Wrangling with Python and has been working with Python since 2008. She helped form the first PyLadies chapter in Los Angeles, CA and has worked at numerous start ups and corporations incorporating Python into automation, data analysis and web development. She works as a data analysis consultant and teacher in Berlin. You can find more of her writings on Twitter @kjam or on her site kjamistan.

Chief Operating Officer at Creamfinance

Patrick Koeck is a Chief Operating Officer and a previous Chief Risk Officer in European Smart-data powered lender Creamfinance. Before coming to Creamfinance, he tested his mettle in companies such as Alkoe GmbH, the Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company and KPMG Austria, where he focused on database management and Financial Controlling. After nearly 3 years in Creamfinance, he did not only manage to facilitate country launches, but has been a vital part in company’s growth, which resulted in Creamfinance group reaching €30M run rate revenue. At the moment he is responsible for improving automation and development in the 5 countries where the company is located – Latvia, Poland, Czech Republic, Georgia and Denmark.

Co-Founder of Metacollect

Moritz Beber is a founding member of metacollect which started at the refugee hackathon in October 2015 in Berlin. With metacollect Moritz follows the vision of an open data service that – through its partner platforms - will allow initiatives in the refugee aid and integration space to simplify their online presence, to improve their reach, to better self-organize and exchange knowledge, and enable new innovative services to be built.

Founder, Principal & Creative Director of Radish Lab

Alana is the founder, Principal, and Creative Director at Radish Lab, an interactive agency focused exclusively on social impact projects. An award-winning journalist turned digital media producer, storyteller, and project manager of all things pixelated, Alana's been in the industry for over 13 years. She's worked across three continents but is a Brooklyn girl at heart, not to mention a born-and-raised Canadian, which makes her really nice. Her work has been recognized internationally in publications like Fast Company, the Guardian, CBC, NPR, Discover Magazine, and Mashable.

Chief Data Scientist at Outfittery

Steven Lemm is Chief Data Officer at Outfittery, Europe's leading curated shopping service for fashion. At Outfittery he devises the company's data strategy and built up a holistic Data department dealing with tasks from classical Business Intelligence to the development of Machine Learning solutions. Before joining Outfittery, he has worked at Zalando as Data Science Lead and Product Group Owner for Risk Management. He also worked on algorithmic trading solution for Deutsche Bank with traders in HongKong and London. He received his PhD in Machine Learning from TU Berlin, Germany in 2007, while working as Senior Researcher at the Intelligent Data Analysis Group at Fraunhofer Institute FIRST.

Professor of Machine Learning at IE Business School

As Machine Learning specialist, François-Xavier Rousselot managed teams of up to eighteen Data Scientists. Today, François-Xavier Rousselot is Affiliate Professor at IE Business School and is coaching MNCs, Startups on their Data projects (TF1, TripAdvisor, PWC, HEC and Polytechnique’s Incubator to name a few) or helping specialists of Analytics. François-Xavier Rousselot is a graduate from HEI (1997) and an alumni of the prestigious IE Business School (International MBA - 2008). He has more than 20 years of work experience in the digital field: at French Embassy in Beirut, at Marketing department of Neuf Télécom/SFR, heading Cloud computing of F-Secure Corporation (North and Latin America), and now working on applications of Machine Learning and AI within different sectors, with a strong expertise in Media Analytics.

Senior Researcher/Co-Founder of TU Wien/ContextFlow GmbH

Allan Hanbury is Senior Researcher and Privatdozent at the TU Wien, Austria. Since 2010, he has coordinated EU-funded research and development projects on analysis and search of medical text and image data. This led to the recent founding of a start-up, ContextFlow, which is bringing the developed radiology image search technology to the market. His team at the TU Wien also works on the analysis and search of unstructured data in technical documents (patents, scientific publications), financial documents (bank and company annual reports), and enterprise social networks. He also leads a project to develop the fundamentals of a Data-Services Ecosystem in Austria.

Co-founder of D3M Labs

Elizabeth Press is founder of D3M Labs, a consultancy that empowers organizations to cultivate strategic advantages and monetize digital assets by creating and marketing digital products. Organizations D3M Labs has worked with include Mondelez, Betahaus, Accelerate Korea, IAV and global players in financial services and GovTech. As an intrapreneur at Dell, Elizabeth built up and managed advanced analytics functions globally. Before Dell, she worked in top-tier strategy consulting and quantitative finance. Elizabeth mentors at the ReDI school of Digital Integration. She has a BA in International Relations from Tufts University and an MSc in International Economics and Business from the Stockholm School of Economics.

Team lead data modeling, data architecture and data vault at ITGAIN

Dirk Lerner is a well experienced IT Consultant at ITGAIN and is as team lead responsible for the Competence Center Data Architecture, Data Modeling & Data Vault. For around 15 years he has headed BI projects and is considered an expert for BI architectures and data modeling. Dirk is an advocate of flexible, lean and easily extendable data warehouse principles and practices. As a pioneer for Data Vault in Germany he published various publications, is an international speaker at conferences and author of the blog http://www.datavaultmodeling.de.

CEO & Founder of Neuro Flash

Jonathan is a computational Neuropsychologist turned serial entrepreneur. Seduced by the opportunity to optimize consumer experience using machine learning, he led the Science team in a dutch IBM Big Data Venture (Gumbolt.com). Afterwards, he Co-Founded Neuro-Flash.com a market research institute, using online experiments that illuminate the true drivers of desire and purchase behaviour. When he’s not combining Neuroscience and Big-Data to test innovative ideas, he likes burgers and a friendly match of badminton.

Lead Developer at Valo.io

Tobias is technical lead developer for Valo.io in London. He has a background in the financial sector as a front-office developer but changed track in 2013 to be part of a team building a new real-time analytics platform from the ground up. His goal is to outlive the JVM and his tea addiction. This is his first appearance on the conference scene as a speaker.

Senior Analyst, Executive Compensation at Willis Towers Watson

Lisa-Christina Winter is an expert in statistical and empirical research methods with an emphasis on evaluation methods and experimental design, making use of various statistical software tools and technologies. Lisa studied Psychology as a natural science in Graz, Austria, and since then, has developed a passion for Data Science and Big Data. Her collection and distribution of information on Big Data on Twitter and LinkedIn led to Lisa being named an “influential individual” in the field of Big Data on several occasions. Besides her work as an executive compensation analyst at Willis Towers Watson (WTW), Lisa is part of WTW’s core Big Data Team, and supports Lillian Pierson (Data-Mania LLC), one of the world-wide leading data scientists.

Université Paris Diderot

William Pritchard studied Maths at the University of Durham, England, before training as a chartered accountant. After working at a big 4 firm for several years, he reoriented his career goals towards data science and took a Masters course in statistics, financial maths and programming at Université Paris Diderot.

Co-Founder of Pivii Technologies

Vladislav is an entrepreneur, machine learning enthusiast and DevOps geek. Currently, he is co-founding a startup, running a data engineering consulting business, travelling and writing on data-related topics.

Chief Data Scientist at IBM Watson

Romeo Kienzler works as Chief Data Scientist in the IBM Cloud Transformation Lab Zurich, he holds a M. Sc. Degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Information Systems, Bioinformatics and Applied Statistics. He is a big fan of Open Source and the Apache Software Foundation.

CEO of Pivigo

Kim has a background in science, with a PhD in Astrophysics and also an MBA from Cranfield School of Management. She is the co-founder and CEO of Pivigo – the Data Science Hub. Pivigo is a data science marketplace and training provider based in London. Founded in 2013, Pivigo aims to improve the employability of PhDs by training them as data scientists, which is a highly in-demand commercial skillset. Since the launch of Pivigo, Kim has been named a Rising Star among the Top 100 Influencers of Big Data in the UK and she is also the chair of a TechUK Big Data skills working group and member of the Government’s Data Skills Taskforce.

Scientific Consultant & Instructor at Additive

Dr. Kai Gansel currently works as a scientific consultant and instructor at ADDITIVE, a provider of software and hardware solutions in the fields of quality management, client-server applications, cloud services, and automated large-scale data analyses. He gained his passion for complex data mining problems during his studies on the basic functioning of neural networks, which he conducted in his own lab at the Max-Planck-Institute for Brain Research since 2004. Attempting to crack the neural code, he developed efficient methods for the detection and assessment of potentially meaningful activity patterns and was able to describe the neural syntax in unprecedented detail. His work was honored in 2012 as a key scientific article on Global Medical Discovery. At ADDITIVE, he is mainly responsible for advising customers from both science and industry on their data mining projects and developing tailor-made algorithms and routines for data analysis, visualisation and reporting.

Chief Data Scientist at *um

Klaas Wilhelm Bollhoefer is Chief Data Scientist at The unbelievable Machine Company GmbH (*um), Berlin. UX Professional, Information Architect and Pulse Generator. Organizing the Data Science Day (DSDay) and the Big Data Week, Berlin. Lecturing on Project Governance and Social Media at several German Universities (e.g. TU Berlin, HTW Berlin and the University of Applied Sciences Cologne). Occasionally publishing specialist articles and reports. In his role as Data Thinker he operates across all sectors and supports Germany's largest media, commercial, and automotive companies in their individual digital development. He is also member of committees and juries of international big data events.

Co-Founder & Inventor at Cortical.io

Francisco Webber is the Founder and CEO of Cortical.io, a company that develops Natural Language Processing solutions for Big Text Data. Francisco’s medical background in genetics combined with over two decade’s of experience in Information Technology, inspired him to create a groundbreaking technology, called Semantic Folding, which is based on the latest findings on the way the human neocortex processes information. Prior to Cortical.io, Francisco founded Matrixware Information Services, a company that developed the first standardized database of patents. Francisco also initiated the Information Retrieval Facility, a non-profit research institute, with the goal to bridge the gap between science and industry in the information retrieval domain.

Interaction designer, product designer, entrepreneur at Designswarm

Alexandra is an interaction designer, product designer, entrepreneur based in London. She was named 2nd in Top 100 Internet of Things Thought Leaders (Onalytica, 2014) and in the Top 100 Influencial Tech Women on Twitter (Business Insider, 2014). She is the founder of the Good Night Lamp, connected lamps for your global friends and family. She is also the Director of designswarm a strategic consultancy focusing on the internet of things. Some of her clients include BBC R&D, Nokia, British Gas, EDF R&D and British Telecom. She was co-founder and CEO of Tinker London, a smart product design studio. Tinker was the first distributor of the Arduino platform in the UK. She has been running the London Internet of Things meetup since 2011, one of the largest meetups on that topic in the world. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria & Albert Museum and galleries around the world.

Developer Advocate at Elastic

Philipp is a Developer Advocate at Elastic, spreading the love and knowledge of full-text search, analytics, and real-time data. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and meetups about all things search & analytics, databases, cloud computing, and devops. Philipp lives in Vienna where he enjoys experimenting with software, organizing meetups, and sports.

CTO and Chief Data Scientist at Gpredictive GmbH

Dennis Proppe is the CTO and Chief Data Scientist at Gpredictive, where he helps building software that enables data scientists to build and deploy predictive models in a few minutes instead of weeks. He has 10 years+ of expertise in extracting business value from data. Before co-founding Gpredictive, he worked as a marketing science consultant. Dennis holds a PhD in statistical marketing.

Data Scientist at Etsy

Andrew joined Etsy in 2014, and lives in London, making him their first data scientist outside the USA. Since then he has worked on a variety of challenges including localized recommendations, image similarity search and anomaly detection. Prior to Etsy he spent almost 15 years designing machine learning workflows, and building search and analytics services, in academia, startups and enterprises, and in an ever-growing list of research areas including biomedical informatics, computational linguistics, social media analytics, and educational gaming. These days he’s interested in probabilistic algorithms and data structures, online learning, deep learning, data visualization, and the convergence of search and recommender systems. He can count to over 1000 on his fingers but doesn’t know how to drive a car.

Project Lead at Open Knowledge Foundation Germany

Julia is an activist who’s passionate about growing open communities. Since 2013, she is the project lead for the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany and a consultant for The Engine Room. She has been running multiple community projects that foster the reuse of open data, such as Germany’s first Civic Tech Incubator ‘Stadt Land Code’ and a series of hackathons on transport,energy and citizen science. Code for Germany, her latest project in collaboration with Code for America, is a civic tech community with 25 labs and more than 350 members all across Germany. In 2016 she kicked off a prototype fund for civic tech projects in collaboration with the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany.

Lead Data Scientist at codecentric AG

Dr. Stefan Kühn is Lead Data Scientist at codecentric. Together with his team he is developing robust, fast and intelligent algorithms and is applying modern machine learning methods for analyzing large datasets. Before codecentric he was a researcher in the Scientific Computing Group at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences Leipzig with a focus on Tensor Approximation and Higher-Order Singular Value Decomposition. He earned a Diploma in Applied Mathematics, with a focus on Mathematical Optimization, at the University of Hamburg. He went on to get PhD in Applied Mathematics with a focus on Numerics, Tensor Approximation and Higher-Order Singular Value Decomposition, at the Max Planck Insitute for Mathematics in the Sciences Leipzig in 2012.

Technical Presenter at Wolfram

Dr. Robert Cook is one of Wolfram Europe’s technical consultants, specializing in projects related to descriptive and predictive analytics. Be it calculating correlations, managing machine learning, or battling Bayesian methods – Dr. Cook relies on the wealth of algorithms on offer by the Wolfram Language to rapidly delve into the depths of data. Before joining Wolfram, Robert completed a PhD in condensed matter physics and a Masters degree in Chemistry at the University of Warwick, England, and brings the pragmatic approach of an experimental scientist to his roles within Wolfram. In his spare time, Robert is an avid Ultimate Frisbee player, cyclist, and occasional baker.

Head of EMEA Online Partnerships at Google

Yuval Dvir is theHead of EMEA Online Partnerships. Prior to joining Google, Yuval headed the Business Transformation group at Skype, responsible for driving the strategic alignment of the division and the data culture across wider Microsoft. Yuval brings years of international experience in Strategy, Operations and Product gained in large multinationals and technological start-ups as a consultant.

Business Development at OpenDataSoft

Christina Schönfeld is in charge of business development for OpenDataSoft in the German-speaking market. There, she helps governments & companies alike to publish data and to generate APIs through an easy-to-use platform. Her mission is to develop an Open Data ecosystem similar to that which is currently growing in France, in order to drive innovation and to boost Smart City initiatives. Christina has experience working in management consulting and large multinationals where she focused on the impact of digitalisation on business and operating models. She holds an M.Sc. in European Business from ESCP Europe as well as an M.A. in Journalism and Strategic Communications.

Senior Data Scientist at Dataiku

Pierre Gutierrez is a senior data scientist at Dataiku. As a data science expert and consultant, Pierre has worked in diverse sectors such as e-business, retail, insurance or telcos. He has experience in various topics such as smart cities, fraud detection, recommender systems, or IoT.

Risk Consultant at Willis Towers Watson

Nicolas Rossetti is a data and statistics expert with a focus on economic/behavioral statistics and financial stochastic risk. Nicolas studied Business Management and Actuarial Science at the Faculty of Business and Economics of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Leveraging on his technical knowledge, Nicolas has been working as a Risk Consultant at Willis Towers Watson (WTW) since early 2015, where he contributed to develop and build risk models using various, sophisticated statistical methods for evaluating, aggregating, and understanding companies’ exposure to risk. Nicolas’ strong passion for data science and big data, combined with his interest for IT, mathematics, statistics and economics make him an all-rounder when it comes to the identification and modeling of use cases. Driven by this passion, he joins the field of big data by analyzing big data use cases in the field of insurance. His unique interest and skillset bring a new view on big data potentials.

Senior Data Scientist at Microsoft

I'm a generalist in a tight-knit data team enabling data driven company culture and operations as a data janitor, data analyst and occasional data scientist. Doing ETL and Data Quality, defining company-wide KPIs and metrics with management, producing BI, exploring user behaviour to trigger actionable changes in marketing and product, A/B testing, feature engineering for ML, building webapp for secret sauce internal data tool. Long live Bayes and Occam! Tools are mostly bash, Python, Redshift, Tableau, SQL, Python, Flask, Mustache, Wizard, Optimizely.

Data Science Anthropologist and Analyst at Rebaie Analytics Group

Ali Rebaie is a principal industry analyst at Rebaie Analytics Group. He is also a prominent data scientist, consultant and keynote speaker. As a data science anthropologist, Rebaie has been studying the impact of data patterns that govern changes in business, human affairs, and culture. His research, keynotes, and consulting help data natives and business executives to draw power from these universal patterns to better understand its impact on people and the role each one of us play in the data era. His studies are based on the philosophical foundations of data, with focus on the social underpinnings of technology encounters. As a part of his work at Rebaie Analytics Group, Rebaie has led and developed several data science projects for Fortune 500 organizations in different industries such as media, marketing, retail, oil & gas, fashion, energy, and transportation to help them become competitive in the new economy. Ali Rebaie contributed and quoted in leading technology and media outlets and also appeared in several lists of "Who\'s Who in Big Data" since 2013. Ali was one of the initiators of School of Data, jury member in leading big data competitions, and also an Advisory Board member of the internationally renowned Boulder BI Brain Trust (BBBT) in Boulder, USA.

Communications Manager at European Innovation Hub, European Pioneers, Startupbootcamp Digital Health Berlin Mentor

Maren is a storyteller and communicator at heart. She supports several startups and women in tech in establishing strong marketing campaigns to create a successful brand and support sales. In February 2016, Maren joined the team of European Innovation Hub, a small team of startup experts that brings entrepreneurs and corporates together to form strategic partnerships. At European Innovation Hub, she is also the Communications Manager for several EU-funded programs such as Accelerator European Pioneers, Welcome and the new IoT European Platform Initiative.

Professor of Finance at Toulouse Business School

David is an academic researcher with a strong interest in textual analysis in finance. He is a professor of finance at Toulouse Business School in France, and has been a visiting academic at Cass Business School, Aarhus University, Erasmus University, and others. He holds an M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Finance from London Business School, and is a member of the Society of Actuaries. His research on investments and corporate finance has appeared in leading international journals such as Journal of Business, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis and Management Science. Outside of academia, David has worked in the financial and software sectors in the US.

Founder and CEO of 12grapes

Darja Gutnick is the founder and CEO of 12grapes, a startup that focuses on enabling high-growth companies to live up to their potential by selecting the right talent, based on psychology, predictive analytics and AI. The Berlin-based company works with numerous startups, accelerators and VCs and Berlin, London and Tel Aviv to select the right people and support high performance startup teams. Darja is an entrepreneur, organizational psychologist, certified team coach and researcher.

Researcher at Similar Web

I am a data science researcher. I have a diverse academic background - a B.Sc. in electrical engineering, a B.Sc. in physics (cum laude) from Tel Aviv University's prestigious program for parallel B.Sc. in Physics and in Electrical Engineering, an M.Sc. in condensed matter (cum laude), and have started my Ph.D. in bioinformatics. Prior to my M.Sc. I have served as a captain in a technology unit of the IDF.
I am passionate about science and solving complex big data problems that require out of the box thinking, and like to dive deep into the details. I always take a positive, proactive approach, and put an emphasis on understanding the big picture as well.

Associate Director of Quantitative Analytics and Credit Risk at VendorMach

Jacqueline is Associate Director of Quantitative Analytics and Credit Risk at VendorMach. She has over 15 years experience in quantitative finance & credit risk modelling at banks such as BNP Paribas, WestLB and TD Securities. Jacqueline has a PhD from the University of Oxford in Theoretical Physics and an MSc in Mathematical Finance from the University of Waterloo

Co-founder and CEO at Burnmark

Devie is a fintech industry advisor and analyst based in London. She is the Co-founder and CEO of Burnmark, a fintech research company, in partnership with FinLeap. She is also the marketing strategist and UK co-ordinator for FinLeap. She is a researcher on the ING group Think Forward initiative on better financial decision making. She writes extensively on innovation, disurption and digitalisation and is a columnist with several publications. She is actively involved in the fintech community and has been listed in the top 10 of City AM newspaper’s FinTech Powerlist and in Innotribe’s FinTech Power Women list.

Big Data SME Lead for DACH, HPE

Abdou Faye is Subject Matter Expert in Big Data, Predictive Analytics / Machine Learning and Business Intelligence, with more than 19 years of experience in that area in various leading and executive roles, both from a Technical, Architecture and Sales perspectives. He recently joins HPE coming from SAP, where he was leading the Predictive Analysis & Big Data CoE (Center Of Excellence) business since 2010 for DACH, CEE and CIS region, in charge of Business Development and Sales Support. Prior to SAP, he worked 4 Years at Microsoft as Senior BI & SQL-Server Consultant in Switzerland, after 10 years spent at Philip Morris (CH), Orange Telco (CH) and SEMA Group (FR). Abdou graduated from Paris 11 University in 2000, where he completed a PhD on Data Mining/Predictive Analytics, after completing a Master in Computer Science.

CEO at Hivemind Technologies AG

Since 1996, Erik Schmiegelow has worked as a software architecht and consultant, building large data processing platforms for companies such as NTT DoCoMo, Royal Mail, Siemens, E-Plus, Allianz and T-Mobile; and until 2001 he was CTO at the Cologne-based digital agency denkwerk.
In 2007 he founded the telecommunications consulting agency Itellity, followed by Hivemind Technologies in 2014. Hivemind Technologies is a solutions and services company, focussed on big data analytics and stream processing technologies for web, social data and industrial applications. Erik studied computer sciences in Hamburg.

Senior UAV Applications Expert at Drone Industry Insights

NiMA Asghari is working at the heart of the drone market as a senior UAV applications expert at Drone industry insights. Droneii is a market research and analytics company based in Hamburg which provides insights, competitive intelligence and market data for the commercial drone industry. In 2014, he co-founded Caspian GmbH with the mission to help businesses bring AI and computer vision to their drone applications. Prior to entering the UAV business, NiMA had a stint as a tech reporter for Iran’s largest technology media outlet where he covered robotics and high-tech gadgets. When he is not busy looking for ways to automate more jobs with drones and robots, he spends his time studying and researching AI and human brain from a philosopher’s perspective at Institute of Cognitive Science (IKW), University of Osnabrueck.

You can pick his brain on Twitter via @insideNiMA

Director Digital Health DACH at IBM Deutschland GmbH

Bart de Witte, is Director of Digital Health DACH at IBM Germany. In this role he leads the newly formed Digital Health Unit, focusing on digital Health transformation, stimulating innovation in the DACH health sector, leveraging the company’s investments around cognitive solutions and Watson Health. Bart De Witte has over 17 years of experience in the digital health sector, calls himself a healthcare nerd and is a faculty member of guest lecturer of the University of Applied Sciences in Business Administration Zurich on Digital Health, and is a founder of the Austrian Quantified Self Organization.

VP, Internal Innovation & Operations at Target Corporation

Jason is one of the world’s most experienced leaders of data-driven corporate startups and transformations.
Past five years he’s been CEO of a Californian-Bavarian SaaS company, Echtzeit GmbH, which builds machine-learning applications (e.g., dynamic merchandising, pricing yielding, promos) for large European consumer brands on Hadoop and other Apache open-source cloud technologies.
Most recently he led Uber’s launch in the State of Nevada, the fastest in company history. His responsibilities included all aspects of scaling the business: strategy & planning, legal & policy, team building, and day-to-day operations meshing supply and demand in hyper-growth. The launch received national attention.
He has also served as board advisor to global cyber-security companies and retailers such as Gap, Inc. and the Otto Group.
Prior to that he led algorithmic marketing during the successful transformations of Caesars, and eBay and AT&T Wireless. His team’s successes in increasing consumer engagement and cross-selling – and reversing churn spirals – generated billions of dollars of shareholder value for those companies.
He began his professional career as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, working mainly with blue-chip telecoms and banking clients in Europe.
His graduate training was as Fulbright Scholar to Germany and Economics at Harvard.

VP, Data & Machine Learning Platforms at Zalando SE

Entrepreneurial technology leader with over 20 years hands-on experience in developing and executing technical & business product strategies.
Passionate and successful in growing new revenue in multiple technology areas including: Machine Learning & Data Sciences, Software Development, Online Retail, Search Engines, SEO, Digital Media, and Online Advertising.
Hands-on expertise in Profit & Loss Management, Product Management, Product Marketing, Product Development & Engineering, Sales & Marketing, Strategic Planning, and Business Development.
Empowering leader with a results-oriented style who excels in customer-facing and people-management roles with a talent for hiring, developing, coaching and inspiring teams to top performance. Passionate about driving growth in technology companies using unique depth of business and technical expertise.

Head of Data Science at GetYourGuide

Alexander Weiss is Head of Data Science at GetYourGuide, one of the world's most successful online travel startups, where he is in charge of the company's algorithmic intelligence and deep analytics.
After receiving his PhD in econophysics from TU Berlin, Alexander worked as a risk manager at the world's third largest re-insurer, Hannover Re, where he applied prediction models to estimate the company's losses due to natural catastrophes. When he discovered data science and the fast-paced startup world, he did not hesitate to leave his mapped out career path and started working at the small, Berlin based mobile advertising startup Trademob. He spent the next 3.5 years on building and improving their real-time bidding platform for mobile ads.
Alexander is also the founder and organizer of "Algorithms & Data Challenges Berlin", one of Berlin's most popular data science meetups.

Director of Education at German Tech Entrepreneurship Center (GTEC)

Christoph is the Director of Education at the German Tech Entrepreneurship Center (GTEC) and founder of Berlin's boutique accelerator program, Berlin Startup Academy. He is widely known as one of Germany's leading experts and speakers on startups and digitization, having joined his first startup team in 1999 and hosting tech events since 2008. In the past two years, he was particularly active working with leadership teams of large German and European corporations and social startups, helping both to make use of digitalization to reorganize, scale, and thrive.

Steering Group for Strategic Communications at the German Federal Foreign Office / Auswärtiges Amt

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Lukas joined the German Federal Foreign Office in 2014. After a position at the East Africa Desk at headquarters in Berlin, he was asked to help build the new staff for strategic communications of the German Federal Foreign Office, which aims to deepen dialogue on German foreign policy with publics and Germany and around the world. Before moving into the public sector, Lukas spent four years at global management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, most recently as Project Manager. His client work for companies and governments focused on energy, sustainability, digitalization, and economic growth strategies. During the historic years of Myanmar opening up after decades of isolation, he co-authored the first report of the McKinsey Global Institute on the economic potential of Myanmar. Lukas holds a Master of Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a BA in history, politics, philosophy, and economics from the University of Pennsylvania and Sciences Po in Paris. A few years ago, he spent a sabbatical at Stanford University, soaking up sun, programming, and design thinking."

Scientific Director at German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)

Hans is Scientific Director and Head of the Language Technology Lab at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). He also serves as site lead of DFKI’s Berlin branch. Hans studied at TU Berlin and the U of Texas at Austin. After research positions at SRI International in Menlo Park and IBM in Stuttgart, he became full professor for computational linguistics at Saarland U. in Saarbruecken where he taught for more than 20 years. He co-founded one print magazine and several language technology startups. Hans’s main interests in AI are foundations and applications of language and knowledge technologies. He has been leading several European and national projects in knowledge extraction, text analytics and automatic translation. His research is documented by more than 200 publications.

Innovation & Cooperation Manager for the European Innovation Hub

Kathleen Olstedt has analysed and built tech ecosystems since 2004. As a trend forecaster for Daimler AG she explored the interaction between Society & Technology. Afterwards, she joined the "Electronic Media" department of Axel Springer SE, where she led pilot projects and implemented new media technologies. The constant exchange with Berlin's startup scene subsequently led her to IBB Ventures where she was responsible for investments in Berlin's creative industries. Today, Kathleen coordinates the IoT-European Platforms Initiative and works as Innovation & Cooperation Manager for the European Innovation Hub (an etventure company).

Data Analyst for Global Migration Data Analysis Center (GMDAC)

Jasper works for the Global Migration Data Analysis Center in Berlin. The data center is part of the UN-Migration Agency – the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). Previously, Jasper worked for the Worldbank and the Migration Policy Group. He holds a MA from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences and a PhD in Quantitative Social Sciences from the University of Bamberg

Managing Director Space Shack

Daria is a cofounder of Space Shack, a fast growing coworking space in Berlin that supports startup and tech expert communities. Her story includes working in art, nonprofit and corporate worlds. A few years ago Daria dived into the startup sea of Berlin. She is eager to share knowledge in her startup crash course in TU Berlin, as well as giving talks on various events.

CEO at Leverton

Emilio is CEO of LEVERTON. As a passionate data strategist, entrepreneur, ex-banker and researcher – Emilio revolutionizes how individuals work with data and documents.
LEVERTON develops and applies disruptive deep learning / machine learning technology to extract and manage data from corporate documents in more than 20 languages. Global clients such as Bilfinger, Clifford Chance, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, JLL and Strabag trust LEVERTONs smart data solution which enables a web-based contract management with the highest data security.
Before LEVERTON, Emilio spent six years with Houlihan Lokey and Goldman Sachs in Investment Banking in London. He was involved in >20 financial transactions (incl IPOs, M&As, Capital Increases and Restructurings).
Emilio studied Economics and Management in Bonn and Leipzig and graduated with a PhD (summa cum laude) in the field Strategic Management. He wrote two books ('Strategies for Innovators' and 'The Nature of Executive Work') and spent a year as Visiting Researcher at the University of Oxford.
Specialties: finance, real estate, innovation, strategy, business intelligence, venture building

Co-Founder & Managing Director at Savedo GmbH

Steffen Wachenfeld is the co-founder and managing director of SAVEDO, an international online-platform for financial services, specialized in savings products and online-banking. Steffen is responsible for Banking Relations, Operations and Product.
Savedo is a venture belonging to FinLeap and HitFox Group. Steffen joined the HitFox Group in 2013 as a serial entrepreneur with both a business and technology background. Inside the group he worked as Venture Partner, co-founding and growing new ventures as well as driving cutting edge technology and business topics before founding and committing long-term to Savedo.
Prior to HitFox, Steffen ran an IT business for over 10 years, was co-founder of Capino GmbH, a company developing language software, and worked as a Consultant at The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) on projects across different verticals including financial industry.
Steffen studied both business and IT. He received a PhD in Computer Science as well as two Master Degrees in both Computer Science and Information Systems from the University of Muenster. After his PhD, he worked as a PostDoc at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), where he was also a member of Penn Biotech Group, the business consulting group of the Wharton Business School.

CTO at N26

Lead Software Engineer - Machine Learning Team at source{d}

Currently Vadim is a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at source{d} where he works on deep neural networks that aim to understand all of the world's developers through their code. Vadim is one of the creators of the distributed deep learning platform Veles (https://velesnet.ml) while working at Samsung. Afterwards Vadim was responsible for the machine learning efforts to fight email spam at Mail.Ru. In the past Vadim was also a visiting associate professor at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, teaching about new technologies and conducting ACM-like internal coding competitions. Vadim is also a big fan of GitHub (vmarkovtsev) and HackerRank (markhor), as well as likes to write technical articles on a number of web sites.

Chief Data Officer at Project A Ventures

Martin Loetzsch works at Project A Ventures, a Berlin based operational VC with a focus on e-commerce, infrastructure and SaaS. As its Chief Data Officer, he has helped many of its portfolio companies forming teams that build data warehouses and other data driven applications. Before joining Project A (with a short interlude at Rocket Internet), he worked in artificial intelligence labs in Paris and Brussels on computational linguistics and robotics. He received a PhD in computer science from the Humboldt University of Berlin.

CTO & Chief Scientist at Acesio

Alejandro (Alex) Jaimes is CTO & Chief Scientist at Acesio. Acesio focuses on Big Data for predictive analytics in Healthcare to tackle disease at worldwide scale, impacting individuals and entire populations. We use Artificial Intelligence to collect and analyze vast quantities of data to track and predict disease in ways that have never been done before- leveraging environmental variables, population movements, sensor data, and the web. Prior to joining Acesio, Alex was CTO at AiCure and prior to that he was Director of Research/Video Product at Yahoo where he led research and contributions to Yahoo's video products, managing teams of scientists and engineers in New York City, Sunnyvale, Bangalore, and Barcelona. His work focuses on Machine Learning, mixing qualitative and quantitative methods to gain insights on user behavior for product innovation. He has published widely in the top-tier conferences (KDD, WWW, RecSys, CVPR, ACM Multimedia, etc), has been a visiting professor (KAIST), and is a frequent speaker at international academic and industry events. He is a scientist and innovator with 15+ years of international experience in research leading to product impact (Yahoo, KAIST, Telefonica, IDIAP-EPFL, Fuji Xerox, IBM, Siemens, and AT&T Bell Labs). He has worked in the USA, Japan, Chile, Switzerland, Spain, and South Korea, and holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Senior Investment Manager at High-Tech Gründerfonds

Lead Security Architect At Lloyds Bank Group

Anish has been working in the security and cryptography area for the past 15 years, as a researcher and as a consultant. His first brush with payments systems was 15 years ago when he was involved in building a micropayments system for Ericsson. He has spent half his career researching cryptographic algorithms and protocols at three different research groups including Microsoft Research. He also has published multiple papers in the area of security and cryptography and contributed to thought leadership in security space, through guides, POV, white papers and talks. He has also worked as a strategy consultant for Accenture and Capgemini. Most recently he has been involved in the Blockchain ecosystem as one of the founding members of UKDCA . He is also on the advisory board for Ripple Labs, IEET, EA ventures, Adjoint and Chain of Things. These days he works for large UK bank where he is lead security architect.

Founder of "Mein Grundeinkommen“

Michael Bohmeyer is an entrepreneur from Berlin who has one question: Would an Unconditional Basic Income for everyone work?
He gave it a try! In 2014 he started to crowdfund money to actually pay it to randomly selected people for one year. His team of 20 people portraits the stories of the 60 winners and therefore has answers to the question: What do people actually do once their income is unconditional.

Martin Held, Data Scientist at Finleap

Martin made his first contact with the great potential of data analysis when he saw how it can be utilised to significantly improve the diagnostics of cancer. Motivated by this early experience he decided to pursue a PhD in the field, setting out to investigate the dynamics of molecular systems using fancy statistical modelling techniques. After finishing his PhD he moved on to a big pharmaceutical cooperation to facilitate the automation of statistical analysis and reporting of pre-clinical research experiments. His next career step took him into a more dynamic environment: an organisation whose mission it is to build and incubate startups. Where he now works on different venture projects tackling a wide range of data related questions, ranging from click through rate optimisation to microservice based data processing.