Announcing Keynotes for The Data Lake Summit

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October 7, 2020 by and Updated March 21st, 2024

With just a week to go, we are excited to announce the keynote speakers for The Data Lake Summit, the definitive virtual conference for all things data lake.

With featured talks from AWS, Google, The Walt Disney Company, Expedia, MiQ, Zeotap, and more, the virtual summit provides an opportunity to network and mingle with the industry’s best data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts, and data leaders. The two-day virtual conference, scheduled to be held on October 13-14, 2020, is the place to learn about how to build and optimize a data lake for your business success. The summit will provide attendees with the tools to innovate, differentiate, and modernize with data science, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning. You can read more about the virtual conference here.

With just a week to go, we are excited to announce the keynote speakers for The Data Lake Summit, the definitive virtual conference for all things data lake.

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Without further ado, here’s the keynote lineup for the summit.

Day 1 Keynotes – Tuesday, October 13 (9:00 am PDT)

Ashish Thusoo, Qubole

Ashish Thusoo will kick off the Data Lake Summit on October 13 with his welcome and keynote session. Ashish is the Co-founder and CEO of Qubole. Prior to co-founding Qubole, Ashish ran Facebook’s Data Infrastructure team; under his leadership the team built one of the largest data processing and analytics platforms in the world. The platform achieved not just the bold aim of making data accessible to analysts, engineers, and data scientists, but drove the big data revolution. In the process of scaling Facebook’s Big Data infrastructure, he helped drive the creation of a host of tools, technologies, and templates that are used industry-wide today.

Debanjan Saha, Google

Debanjan Saha from Google is the guest keynote speaker for Day 1 of the summit, in a fireside chat with Ashish Thusoo. Debanjan is the Vice President and GM of Data Analytics services, including BigQuery, Dataflow, PubSub, Dataproc, Data Fusion, Composer, Catalog, etc. at Google Cloud. In this role, he is responsible for engineering, operations, and go-to-market, including overall P&L, of the Analytics business in GCP.

Prior to joining Google, Debanjan led Database services at AWS. One of his proudest accomplishments at AWS is the development and launch of Amazon Aurora, a massively scalable relational database service re-imagined for the cloud. In 2019, he was named one of the Technology Executives of The Year for transforming the database industry. He also led the development and launch of AWS Glue, data integration, and transformation service at the core of AWS Data lake.

Before AWS, Debanjan held multiple executives and technical leadership positions in IBM, including a two-year international assignment in Shanghai, China. One of his key accomplishments in IBM is the development of Storwize, a family of virtualizing storage controllers and growing it to a $1 billion per year business in less than four years. Earlier in his career, he was a Principal Engineer at Tellium, an optical networking pioneer, that he helped grow from an early stage start-up to a public company ($3 billion+ IPO). Debanjan, a Fellow of the IEEE and a Distinguished Member of the ACM, has co-authored a book, 50+ US patent applications, and 100+ technical articles, including award-winning papers and major Internet standards.

He earned his MS and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Maryland and his BTech in Computer Science from IIT.

Day 2 Keynotes – Wednesday, October 14 (9:00 am PDT)

Dr. Kirk Borne, Booz Allen Hamilton

Kick-off Day 2 of the summit with Dr. Kirk Borne, Principal Data Scientist, Data Science Fellow, and Executive Advisor at global technology and consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. Since 2015, Dr. Borne has provided thought leadership, mentoring, training, and advisory in data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence across multiple disciplines.

Previously, he was a Professor of Astrophysics and Computational Science at George Mason University for 12 years in the graduate and undergraduate data science programs. Before that, he spent nearly 20 years supporting data systems activities for NASA space science programs, including a role as NASA’s Data Archive Project Scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope. Dr. Borne has degrees in physics (BS, LSU) and astronomy (Ph.D., Caltech). He is an elected Fellow of the International Astrostatistics Association for his contributions to big data research in astronomy.

In 2020, Dr. Borne was elected a Fellow of the American Astronomical Society for lifelong contributions to the field of astronomy. As a global speaker, he has given hundreds of invited talks worldwide, including keynote presentations at dozens of data science, artificial intelligence, and analytics conferences. He is an active contributor on social media, where he promotes data literacy for all, and has been named consistently among the top worldwide social influencers in big data, data science, and artificial intelligence since 2013.

Chris Casey, AWS

We will then complete our second-day keynotes with Chris Casey from AWS. Chris is the Worldwide Head of Business Development for AWS Data Exchange, a service that makes it easy for organizations to find, subscribe to, and use third-party data in the cloud.

Chris has deep experience in data licensing, third-party data, and how data is used in analytics and machine learning workloads to solve business challenges. Before joining AWS, Chris was the Global Head of Bloomberg’s Reference and Regulatory Data business and spent nearly a decade in KPMG’s consulting practice. He assisted numerous Financial Services organizations operating in Australian, North American, and European markets to implement transformation and regulatory compliance programs.

See the full schedule, pre-summit workshop, and sessions. We look forward to seeing you there, so don’t miss out – Register Now.

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Read Part 3: Transactions on the Data Lake