Speakers
This page is updated weekly. Please check back frequently for the latest information.Co-Chairs
Dr. Jerry Oglesby, SASTimothy Rey, The Dow Chemical Company
Keynote Speakers
Bart Baesens, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) and University of Southampton (United Kingdom)Niall Fraser, Open Options Corporation
John MacGregor, McMaster University, Canada
Michael North, Argonne National Laboratory
Petra Perner, Institute of Computer Vision and Applied Computer Sciences
Daniel Thorpe, Wachovia
Session Speakers
Michele Boulanger, JISC ConsultingZach Buckner, Elder Research, Inc.
Michael Cavaretta, Ford's Research and Innovation Center
Jimmy Cela, ChoicePoint Precision Marketing
Goutam Chakraborty, Oklahoma State University
Sven Crone, Lancaster University
Matthew Flynn, ISO and Jun Yan, Deloitte Consulting
Viterbo H. Berbeerena González, Anahuac University (Mexico City)
Anjela Govan, North Carolina State University
Gene Grabowski, Jr, Ford Motor Credit Company
Richard Hale, IBM Corporation
Michael Hardin, University of Alabama
Elsa Jordaan, The Dow Chemical Company
Jin-Whan Jung, Jay King, Sanjay Arangala, SAS
Tom Kondrat, Chrysler
Eric Kuo and Larry Lai, Align Technology, Inc.
Arthur Kordon, The Dow Chemical Company
Kim Larsen, Charles Schwab & Co.
Shihong Li, Choicepoint and Joe Laskos, Genworth Financial
WenSui Liu, Chase Credit Card Service
Carl Meyer, North Carolina State University
Richard Miller, GE
Will Neafsey, Ford Motor Company
Matthew D. Rotelli, Eli Lilly and Company
Jaime Paredes Sanchez, Santander Bank in Mexico
Yves Schabes, Teragram Corporation
Mark Schneiderman, Mobile Agent Technologies
Sascha Schubert, SAS
Mary Beth Seasholtz, The Dow Chemical Company
Harry Seifert, IBM Corporation
Randy Sherrod, Cisco Systems
Simon Sheather and Mike Speed, Texas A&M University
Allen J. Thompson and Richard V. Wherry, Bank of America
Phil Tuchinsky, Tuchinsky BI, LLC and Senior Research Fellow, Central Michigan University Research Corporation
Dirk Van den Poel, Ghent University, Belgium
Herna Viktor, University of Ottawa
Hendrik Wagner, Risk Parameters
Morgan C. Wang, University of Central Florida
Doug Wielenga, SAS
Sanjay Arangala is a Senior Analytical Consultant in the Advanced Analytics Lab (AAL) at SAS. He holds a B.S in Mathematical Sciences and an M.S. in Statistics. For the last year he has been responsible for providing analytical services for the AAL, specializing in fraud detection and credit scoring solutions. He has been an Analytical Consultant at SAS for over 7 years. Prior to joining SAS Mr. Arangala worked as a statistical analyst in credit risk modeling for a large financial services organization.
Dr. Bart Baesens is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Applied Economic Sciences at the K.U.Leuven (Belgium) and the School of Management of the University of Southampton (United Kingdom). He has done extensive research on data mining, credit scoring, and web mining. His findings have been published in well-known international journals and presented at international top conferences. He regularly tutors, advices and provides consulting support to international firms with respect to their data mining and business intelligence policy.
Michele Boulanger recently joined JISC Consulting, a private Performance Analytics and Data Mining consulting firm in Orlando, as Senior Partner and Director. Prior to this assignment, she was Vice President, Quality and Customer Loyalty, within Networks and Enterprise, a $12B infrastructure telecommunications business of Motorola. In that role, she was responsible for defining the business key strategies and deploying the key initiatives regarding customer advocacy, operations performance optimization, and product/service quality. In particular, she drove the deployment of "Digital Cockpit", Six Sigma, and Data Mining globally across all functions and all sites. Michèle joined Motorola after having worked for 10 years at AT&T Bell Laboratories where she led the research and consulting group in Quality Engineering and Analytics. In parallel with her assignments, Dr. Boulanger has been a visiting professor at various institutions, including Columbia University, N.Y. Michèle holds a PhD in Applied
Mathematics from the University of Rhode Island.
Zach Buckner is the Vice President of Technology Elder Research, Inc., a data mining consultancy in Charlottesville, VA. Zach earned BS and Master's degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Virginia, where he won research awards for his work in Biomimicry and advanced digital design. Prior to Elder Research, Inc., Mr. Buckner was a Senior Embedded Software Engineer for GE Fanuc and co-founded a successful software company called Portris. Zach designed award-winning hardware and software products for the Virginia Transportation Research Council and Trimation -- one being named one of the "40 Best Products of 2000" by Control Engineering magazine. Mr. Buckner is named as an inventor on an array of pending and awarded US and international patents, including two that are currently being licensed through the University of Virginia's Patent Foundation.
Michael Cavaretta is the Technical Leader of the Data Mining Group within the Infotronics and Systems Analytics Department at Ford's Research and Innovation Center. He graduated with a BS and information systems from the University of Michigan in 1987, and received an MS and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Wayne State University in 1995. His dissertation was entitled, "The Application of Cultural Algorithms to Real-Valued Optimization." After receiving his Ph.D., he was hired by Churchill Systems, a small consulting company, applying artificial intelligence techniques in high volume retail companies such as Sears and Kmart. Dr. Cavaretta was hired by Ford Motor Company in 1998 as a Technical Specialist for the newly formed Data Mining group, and promoted to Technical Leader of the group in 2001. The Data Mining group applies the technologies of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics, and information visualization primarily in the areas of quality, warranty, market research, and
customer relationship management.
Dr. Goutam Chakraborty has a B.Tech (Honors) in Mechanical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology,
Kharagpur, a PGCGM from Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, a M.S in statistics and a Ph. D. in marketing from
University of Iowa. He has held managerial positions with a subsidiary of Union Carbide, USA and with a subsidiary of
British American Tobacco, UK. He is currently a professor of marketing at Oklahoma State University where he has
taught digital business strategy, web-business strategy, electronic commerce and interactive marketing, data mining and CRM
applications, data base marketing, new product development, marketing research, and product and pricing management for the
past fifteen years. He has presented numerous programs and workshops to executives, educators, and research professionals
in U.S., Europe, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and India. He has won many teac hing awards including "Regents
Distinguished Teaching Award" at OSU, "Outstanding Direct Marketing Educator Award" given by the Direct Marketing
Educational Foundation, New York, Professor of the Year Award at CIMBA Italy, and Great Executive MBA Instructor award at
the University of Iowa, Iowa City. His research has been published in many scholarly journals such as Journal of
Interactive Marketing, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Business
Research, Industrial Marketing Management, etc. He has co-authored the book Contemporary Database
Marketing. In addition, he serves(d) on the editorial review board of Journal of Business Research and
Journal of Academy of Marketing Science. He has chaired the national conference for direct marketing educators for 2004 and 2005. He has also consulted extensively on issues related to developing digital business strategy, building and
managing customer relationships, product development, and management and creation of e-business models with companies such as Aetna, Mercruiser, Thrifty Rent-A-car, Berendsen Fluid Power, Globe Life Insurance, Van guard Realtors, etc.
Michael Conerly is currently Professor and Chair of the Information Systems, Statistics, and Management Science Department in the College of Business at the University of Alabama. His specialty areas are: regression analysis, data mining, statistical computing, graphics and data visualization, process control, multivariate quality control, forecasting, and statistical education. Dr. Conerly earned his B.S. degree from Lamar University, his M.S. degree and Ph.D from Southern Methodist University. Dr. Conerly has published numerous papers dealing with the practical use of statistics to solve "real-world" problems. He has published articles in publications such as Technometrics, Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Statistician, and Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation. He has directed nine dissertations in Applied Statistics and served on more than 40 dissertation committees in other areas at The University of Alabama. He was appointed as an adjunct Research
Scientist at the UAB Cancer Center in 1998. He is a member of the American Statistical Association, Biometric Society and Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
Sven F. Crone is an Assistant Professor in Management Science at the Lancaster University Management School, UK, and deputy director of the Lancaster Research Centre for Forecasting, one of the largest research units in Europe dedicated to predictive modelling. Sven earned his diploma (MBA/M.S. and B.S. equivalent) and a PhD on prediction with neural networks from Hamburg University, Germany, with research fellowships at Stellenbosch Business School, South Africa, and George Mason University, USA. His research focuses on data mining and forecasting in business applications, frequently employing methods from computational intelligence such as neural networks and support vector machines.
Sven has published various articles in international journals and conference proceedings and regularly presents at international conferences, with keynote speeches at SAS F2006 and a track-keynote at APICS 2006. He frequently serves on conference committees, and was the general conference chair of the 2006 International Conference on Data Mining (DMIN) in Las Vegas, USA, where he has remained on the governing board. Sven is also the competition chair of the IEEE?CIS Data Mining Technical Committee (DMTC) and has organised the 2007 Neural Network Forecasting Competition co-sponsored by the IIF, NSF and SAS and chairs the forthcoming 2008 IEEE Competition on Time Series Prediction.
In addition to frequent training courses though the Centre for Forecasting, for the Institute of Business Forecasting and the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, including the 2005 & 2007 tutorials on neural networks at the IEEE summer school in Chile (EVIC), he regularly consults on corporate projects in predictive analytics. Recent projects include RFM-modelling for British Telecom and AXA Winterthur, Switzerland, credit scoring for Provident, direct marketing for German publisher Gruner & Jahr, weather based forecasting for retailer TESCO, forecasting copper prices with neural networks for CODELCO, Chile, and predicting advertisement ratings for UK television network ITV.
Matthew Flynn is a Research Director with ISO Innovative Analytics. Mr. Flynn has more than 10 years experience in Property and Casualty insurance industry. Mr. Flynn joined ISO in 2007. Since then, Mr. Flynn has been a leading modeler for personal lines and commercial lines predictive modeling projects.
Before joining ISO, Mr. Flynn was an Insurance Solutions Architect for SAS Institute, Inc. for three years. There he advised P&C insurers and financial services users on implementing a variety of SAS platforms and modeling solutions
Prior to joining SAS, Mr. Flynn was a Research Manager and Director for the Hartford Insurance Group (HIG) for more than six years.
Matthew received his Ph.D. in Finance from Purdue University.
He has presented the following articles:
- "Offset Techniques for Predictive Modeling for Insurance" NESUG 2007, Baltimore
- "Different Offset Techniques", presented in 2007 Casualty Actuarial Society Predictive Modeling Seminar
- "Using SAS IOM Commands in JSL" JMPer Cable Issue 16 Winter 2005 Special Scripting Edition
As founder of Open Options Corporation, Dr. Niall Fraser's research work forms the basis of the strategic software technology developed by the firm. As Principal Scientist, Dr. Fraser is also responsible for the ongoing technical development of the Open Options software and for managing key client applications. He has worked with a wide range of manufacturing and service companies around the world as well as Canadian military and federal government organizations, US intelligence and military agencies, and international research firms.
Prior to founding Open Options, Dr. Fraser was a full professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada, in the Department of Management Sciences. During that time, his academic research interests included conflict analysis, multiple criteria decision making, game theory, bargaining and negotiation, and compliance verification.
Dr. Fraser holds a Ph.D. in System Design Engineering. He is the author of four books and has also written more than 150 academic publications appearing in journals such as Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, European Journal of Operations Research, Interfaces, Theory and Decision, and Group Decision and Negotiation.
Viterbo H. Berberena González, Ph.D., is a Professor of Analytics at Anáhuac University in Mexico. He graduated in Chemical Engineering from "Universidad Central de Las Villas" in 1985. He specialized in advanced analytic methods at "Mendeleev" Institute, in Moscow, Russia in 1989.
Given his great passion for the analytics area, he pursued graduate studies in Process Analysis, obtaining his Ph.D. with honors in 1991. He also has taught classes at "Universidad Central de Las Villas" (UCLV), "Instituto Politécnico Nacional" (IPN), "Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey" (ITESM), "Universidad Iberoamericana" (UI), "Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México" (ITAM), both at graduate and undergraduate levels. Dr. Berberena has published extensively in marketing analytics and data mining at "Segmento" and "Datos, Diagnósticos y Tendencias", both journals published by ITAM and the Mexican Association of Research Agencies (AMAI) respectively.
He has collaborated with SAS Institute Mexico since 2000 and leads many data mining projects for companies in the financial, telecommunications, retail and others industries in Mexico. Currently, in addition to his lectures at "Universidad Anáhuac", he serves as a Senior Consultant on Analytics to Santander bank in Mexico.
Anjela Govan is currently a PhD student in the Department of Mathematics at North Carolina State University. Anjela works in Data Mining in Applied Mathematics and her research interests include data ranking and data clustering. Anjela earned her Masters in Mathematics from Colorado State University and her Bachelors of Science in Mathematics from University of Michigan.
Gene Grabowski, Jr. serves as Manager of Operations Analytics for Ford Motor Credit Company. His primary focus is to forecast contract originations and collections workload for North America. From these forecasts, optimization techniques are employed to set staffing levels to meet these projected needs.
Gene and his team take a direct role in gathering relevant data and integrating various statistical methods into daily operations. These methods include logistic regression, time series forecasting, optimization and seasonality. Daily responsibilities within his team require a thorough knowledge of SAS and the ability to utilize its features for both IT and business customers.
Gene holds an M.A. in Economics from Michigan State University and a B.S. in Economics from Oakland University in Michigan. He has more than 16 years experience using SAS as both a statistical tool and a programming language. In June 2005, he became a SAS Certified Advanced Programmer.
Dr. Michael Hardin is Associate Dean for Research, and the Director of the Institute of Business Intelligence with the College of Business at the University of Alabama, as well as a professor of statistics at the University. He has authored or co-authored over 90 papers in various journals including the Lancet, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, the American Journal of Epidemiology, the American Statistician, the Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, and Communications in Statistics. He is the author or co-author of over 170 abstracts presented at national meetings and has given over 90 invited lectures or talks. He is the author of several book chapters dealing with database design and decision support systems.
Dr. Hardin often serves as a consultant to healthcare organizations in the areas of data mining, sampling, and program integrity. Additionally, he is an instructor and consultant for SAS in the areas of data mining and time series analysis. He is Adjunct Professor of Biostatistics and Adjunct Professor of Health Informatics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He has served as Scholar in Residence in the Center for Information Management, Department of Information Systems and Operations Management, Loyola University, Chicago, and Visiting Professor in the Department of Management and Information Sciences and Statistics at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.
A member of numerous professional associations including the American Statistical Association, the Biometric Society, and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, Hardin's specialty areas include data mining and knowledge discovery, data visualization, data warehousing, machine learning, statistical classification models, data management and collection methodologies, research design, informatics, the applications of statistical methodologies in the study of aging, and biostatistics.
Hardin earned a B.A. from the University of West Florida, an M.S. from Florida State University and an M.A. and Ph.D from the University of Alabama.
Elsa Jordaan currently works for Dow Chemical in the Netherlands and is a member of the Data Mining and Modeling Group. She joined Dow's R&D Physical Sciences Group in 2003 after completing her Ph.D on Support Vector Machine Regression at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. Elsa also holds a masters diploma in Industrial Mathematics from the Eindhoven University and a B.Sc-degree in Applied Mathematics and Chemistry from the Potchefstroom University in South Africa. She has numerous conference publications on applying SVM, Genetic Programming and Neural Networks in the chemical industry. Her interest also extends to probability-based risk analysis and forecasting.
Jin Whan Jung is an Analytical Consulting Manager in the Advanced Analytics Lab (AAL) at SAS. He has over 20 years of experiences in Analytic Consulting & Strategy. Prior to re-joining SAS in 2006, he served four years as a Vice President of CRM at Samsung Life Insurance, and his team provided analytical supports to Sales, Marketing, Services, and Risk departments within the company. Prior to Samsung Life Insurance, he worked as an Analytical Consultant at SAS and a statistical analyst at UNC Biometric Consulting Lab. He received his PhD degree from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Biostatistics, following his earlier MS and BS degrees in Statistics from Korea University.
Dr. Eric Kuo runs a private orthodontic practice in San Francisco, California (www.SFsmiles.com) and is an Invisalign Premier Provider. He is also the Vice President of Clinical Research and Technology for Align Technology Inc.'s Research and Development department. Dr. Eric Kuo received his orthodontic certificate and Master's degree from UCSF, his DDS degree from UCLA, and his BS degree in Chemistry with Honors from Stanford University. He also received an Executive Management Certificate from Kellogg Northwestern Business School. Dr. Kuo has been giving seminars on Invisalign both in the US as well as internationally since 1999 and was an invited speaker at the annual Invisalign Summit meeting from 2002-2006. Dr. Kuo has authored articles on Invisalign published in the American Journal of Orthodontics, Kieferorthopädie (German), and Progress in Orthodontics. He is also a contributing author to "The Invisalign System Textbook," published in 2006, where he wrote chapters on Invisalign
Attachments: Materials, Overcorrection: Principles and Considerations, and Data Mining: Principles and Considerations.
Jay King is a Senior Analytical Consultant in the Advanced Analytics Lab (AAL) at SAS. He holds a B.S in Mathematics and an M.S. in Applied Mathematics. For the last year he has been responsible for providing analytical services for the AAL, specializing in fraud detection solutions. He has been an Analytical Consultant at SAS for 8 years and has over 15 years of experience in statistical and mathematical consulting. Prior to joining the AAL Mr. King has worked in the Communications Content and Entertainment business unit and was a member of a general group of analytical consultants that provided expertise to SAS customers across all industries.
Mr. Kondrat is currently responsible for the data mining technology strategy for the Chrysler Group IT organization at Chrysler LLC. Headquartered in Auburn Hills, Michigan, the Chrysler Group manufactures automotive vehicles sold under the brand names Chrysler, Dodge, and Jeep®, and parts and accessories sold under the brand name MOPAR®. In his current role since 2001, he has been responsible for the design and implementation of many strategic data mining applications and predictive models that are currently used within the Sales, Marketing, Warranty, Manufacturing, Service and Parts business domains at Chrysler. He holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from Oakland University. He has been a SAS user since 2001.
Arthur Kordon is a Data Mining & Modeling Leader in the Data Mining & Modeling Group in Corporate Work Process and Six Sigma Center, The Dow Chemical Company in Freeport, Texas, USA. He is an internationally recognized expert in applying computational intelligence technologies in industry. Dr. Kordon has successfully introduced several novel technologies for improved manufacturing and new product design, such as robust inferential sensors, automated operating discipline, accelerated fundamental model building, etc. His research interests include application issues of computational intelligence, robust empirical modeling, intelligent process monitoring and control, and data mining. He has published more than 60 papers and 8 book chapters in the area of applied computational intelligence and advanced control. He is a vice-chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Evolutionary Computation.
Dr. Kordon holds a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Varna, Bulgaria and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria.
Larry Lai has over 20 years experience in data mining and customized modeling. He is the Senior Statistician of Clinical Research and Technology for Align Technology. Prior to joining Align Tech, Larry worked for eBay/Paypal Inc., developing the consumer segmentation and high value customer decliner and churn models. Before that, he has experience in industry segments bringing in scoring technology to such companies as Directv and Household Credit Services, and has implemented a real-time scoring system for customer risk management. He was also in charge of developing behavior, attrition and affinity models to improve baseline ROI. Larry also practiced statistical consulting works for healthcare, insurance, manufacturing and research industries in his earlier career. Larry has been teaching courses on "Data Mining and Database Marketing" for the MBA program at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Larry has been a guest speaker at SAS, M2004 and NCDM. Larry received his Ph.D. degree in
Statistics from UCLA under the stewardship of Charles Stone and Leo Breiman.
Joe Laskos is Director of Acquisitions Database Management for Genworth Financial. Joe has been with Genworth Financial for three years and has been advancing list management strategy and managing the analytic relationships supporting the Direct Mail efforts for the Career channel of the LTCi business since his arrival.
Previously, Joe was a VP, Database Management at JPMorganChase in the Consumer Cards Business where he was responsible for the database management of the acquisitions efforts for several different channels: ITA, Prescreen and Balcon.
Joe has ten years experience in numerous roles across DM industries. He has modeled for Retail and Catalog (Blair Inc.), served as a senior Decision Support analyst in the Mortgage industry (Advanta Mortgage), and has managed the Acquisitions Database for a couple of Fortune-500 companies.
Joe holds an M.A. in Mathematics from Hofstra University in New York and a B.S. in Mathematics from Saint Vincent College in Pennsylvania.
Shihong Li is a Senior Marketing Researcher with the Database Analytics Group within ChoicePoint Precision Marketing and has over 8 years of experience in statistical modeling and data mining in the government research institute, insurance and marketing industries. Shihong holds a Master of Science Degree in Statistics from the University of Texas at Austin.
Wensui Liu is a Senior Risk Modeler in Chase Credit Card Service. Prior to Chase, he worked as a statistical project manager in ChoicePoint and has over 9 years of modeling experience in the financial services, healthcare, and marketing industries.
WenSui has published several paper and conference articles in SAS Global Forum, INFORMS Marketing Science Conference, and Direct Marketing Association(DMA) Analytical Journal. His research interests are data mining, machine learning, time series, and statistical computing.
Wensui holds Master Degrees in Business Administration and Econometrics from the University of Cincinnati.
Dr. Carl Meyer is Professor of Mathematics at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC. He received his Ph.D. degree from Colorado State University in 1968. He was a computational scientist at the Atomic Energy Commission's Rocky Flats Facility, and he has held visiting positions at Stanford University (Computer Science), University of Virginia (Applied Mathematics), and the Boeing Company (Phantom Works). His research interests include numerical and applied linear algebra, Markov chains and applied probability, information retrieval, data mining, and web search. Dr. Meyer the author/co-author of six books, the most recent of which are
- Google's PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings, Princeton University Press, 2006, (with A. Langville)
- Matrix Analysis And Applied Linear Algebra, SIAM, 2000
John MacGregor received his PhD degree in Statistics, and MSc degrees in both Statistics and in Chemical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, and his Bachelor of Engineering degree from McMaster University in Canada. After working in industry for several years as a process specialist with Monsanto Company in Texas, he joined the Department of Chemical Engineering at McMaster University in 1972. He currently holds the title of "Distinguished University Professor" and the Dofasco Chair in Process Automation and Information Technology. He is a cofounder of the McMaster Advanced Control Consortium that is sponsored by many international companies and is president of ProSensus, Inc., a spin off company from the consortium.
Dr. MacGregor is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, and has received many awards for his work in applied statistics and chemometrics, among them, the Shewhart Medal and the W.G. Hunter Award from the American Society for Quality, and the Herman Wold Medal from the Swedish Chemical Society. He is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Engineering. He has received many awards from engineering societies, among them, the Century of Achievement Award and the Industrial Practice Award from the Canadian Society for Chemical Engineering, the Computing and Systems Technology Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the Guido Stella Award from the World Batch Forum.
In past years his research focused heavily on advanced process control, and polymer reaction engineering. In more recent years his research has been on the development of multivariate latent variable methods for the extraction and use of information from industrial data for the purposes of process understanding, process monitoring, optimization and control. Specific problems include the monitoring and control of batch processes, the use of digital imaging for process control, and the rapid development of new products.
Richard Miller has spent the last 17 years with GE Appliances focusing on leveraging the information technology infrastructure to maximize the service delivery and customer service processes to reduce waste and increase customer loyalty.
He is currently the Program Manager for the implementation of ServicePower Field Service Solutions for GE Consumer and Industrial. The most recent position prior to his current role was that of the Manager for Claims and Auditing for GE Customer Care. The GE Customer Care network employs over 6000 servicers and processes over 1MM claims annually. Richard was responsible for integrating SAS into the GE claims process in order to more effectively detect and deter suspect claims from the 3rd party service network.
Richard has also held positions as the Operations Manager and Analyst for the GE Consumer Relations group where he focused on data analysis, systems design and policy implementation. He is a graduate of Indiana University and also a veteran of the US Army.
Mr. Neafsey is the Brand DNA and Consumer Segmentation Manager for Ford Motor Company. During his last 16 years with Ford, he has worked in Market Research, New Business Creation and Incubation, Information Technology, Operations Research, Manufacturing, and at Ford Financial. He holds a Bachelors and Masters Degree in Operations Research from Cornell University, as well as an MBA from Cornell's Johnson School.
Michael J. North, MBA, Ph.D. is the Deputy Director of the Center for Complex Adaptive Agent Systems Simulation within the Decision and Information Sciences Division of Argonne National Laboratory and is a Senior Fellow in the Joint Computation Institute of Argonne and the University of Chicago. Dr. North has over fifteen years of experience developing and applying advanced modeling and simulation applications for various branches of the U.S. federal government; state government; several international agencies; private industry; and academia. Dr. North is the lead author of the book "Managing Business Complexity: Discovering Strategic Solutions with Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation" (Oxford 2007) and has published over forty journal articles and conference papers. Dr. North holds ten college degrees, including a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Jerry L. Oglesby holds a Ph.D. in Statistics from Texas A&M University, an M.S. in Mathematics from Lamar
University, and a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Mississippi. He currently works for SAS as the Director of
Higher Education Consulting and Global Certification within the Education Division. This department is charged with
supporting SAS in the university wide community. It has, as its major goal, the introduction of SAS training materials and
software in the curriculums of courses across many units within the universities. Prior to starting this group, he was
Director of Analytical Consulting within the Professional Services Division. As Director of Analytical Consulting he grew
the Department from its formation to approximately forty modelers and business analysts whose primary function was to
provide analytical support and expertise to SAS' sales force and customers. This group was largely responsible for the
support of the successful launch of SAS' award winning data mining solution, Enterprise Miner.
From 1990 until joining SAS in July of 1996, Jerry was employed by Monsanto Chemical Company as plant statistician and Manufacturing Technologist. He was CEO and founding President of SCI Data Systems from 1977 to 1990. Following completion of his doctorate at Texas A&M in 1971, he was a professor of Statistics at the University of West Florida where he established the Institute for Statistical and Mathematical Modeling for doing analytical and computational consulting for clients on and off campus.
Jerry serves on several advisory boards in support of statistics and data mining:
- Data Mining Advisory Board, College of Arts & Sciences, University of Central Florida
- Central Michigan University Research Corporation, Center for Applied Research & Technology, Central Michigan University
- Center for the Management of Information Systems, Department of Information & Operations Management, Mays Business School, Texas A&M University
- Master of Marketing Research Program, Coca-Cola Center for Marketing Studies, Terry College of Business, University of Georgia
- Institute of Business Intelligence, Department of Information Systems, Statistics, and Management Science, Culverhouse College of Commerce and Business Administration, The University of Alabama
- Department of Statistics & Operations Technology, Daniels College of Business, University of Denver
- Industry Advisory Committee, North Carolina Community College System
- Information Technology Advisory Committee, Pennsylvania College of Technology
- Computer Information Systems Division Advisory Board, Wake Technical Community College
- Decision Sciences & Center for Quality & Productivity Advisory Board, Business Computer Information System, College of Business Administration, University of North Texas
Jaime Paredes, SVP Marketing Analytics at Banco Santander in Mexico. He graduated in Chemical Engineering and Computer Science from "Universidad De Las Américas" in 1984 Mexico. Mr. Paredes has extensive experience in the financial services in Mexico for more than 20 years from human resources to Cash Management and Credit & Debit Cards. Since 2000 he has specialized in advanced analytic methods and obtained his SAS Data Mining Certificate in 2003.
In the last six years Jaime Paredes was responsible of building the analytic capabilities for Banco Santander mainly for the Credit & Debit Card Business.
In October 2005, Jaime Paredes received the "First Insight Award" at BetterManagement LIVE in Las Vegas for its work on Segmentation in the Credit Card portfolio, and also for the insights from Better Management applied for building the analytical platform, both for Banco Santander in Mexico.
Mr. Paredes has continuous contact with Universities in Mexico such as "Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey" (ITESM), "Universidad Anáhuac", "Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México" (ITAM), giving keynotes on analytics and specialized topics of credit cards for graduate and undergraduate levels.
Petra Perner is the director of the Institute of Computer Vision and Applied Computer Sciences IBaI. She received her Diploma degree in electrical engineering and her PhD degree in computer science. She has been the principal investigator of various national and international research projects. She received several research awards for her research work and has been awarded with 3 business awards for her work on bringing intelligent image interpretation methods and data mining methods into business. Her research interest is image analysis and interpretation, machine learning, data mining, image mining and case-based reasoning. Recently, she is working on various medical, chemical and biomedical applications, information management applications, technical diagnosis and e-commerce applications. Most of the developments are protected by legal patent rights and can be licensed to qualified industrial companies. She has published numerous scientific publications and patents and is often requested as a
plenary speaker in distinct research fields as well as across disciplines. Her vision is to build intelligent flexible and robust data-interpreting systems that are inspired by the human case-based reasoning process.
Tim Rey graduated in 1979 with an MS in Forestry Biometrics from Michigan State University. He joined Dow in the summer of 1979 in the Math Applications group in Central Research as a Research Statistician. While in the Math Applications Group, Tim conducted projects, consulted, taught and developed linear statistical methods at most of Dow's North American sites. From there he went on to supervise the Math Applications group in 1985 and then on to manage the Research and Technical Applications group in Central Research in 1987. In 1988 he took on the technical management role for the SimuSolv nonlinear simulation, optimization and estimation commercial software development effort in Dow's Central Research organization. Here he conducted joint research with universities to develop nonlinear statistical methods for experimental design and maximum likelihood estimation. At that time he was also responsible for Dow's Quality program in Central Research. In 1996 Tim moved to Dow's Marketing
and Sales Expertise Center where he led the development of Dow's Customer Loyalty program and was also the lead Marketing Research process owner. In 2005 Tim became the manager of Dow's Data Mining and Modeling group situated in Dow's Six Sigma Expertise Center. Tim has written over 100 internal papers as well as published 15 papers externally. He has delivered numerous talks at various quantitative methods forums.
Dr. Rotelli is currently Head of the Statistics Divisions for Cardiovascular Global Product Development, Global Patient Safety, and Global Health Outcomes at Eli Lilly and Company in Indianapolis, Indiana. Previously, Matt has worked in the oncology, endocrine, and neuroscience therapeutic areas in both early phase research and in support of commercialization activities. Matt has had a broad range of experiences across therapeutic areas and phases of development and negotiated successfully through several external partnering and outsourcing arrangements. He is also Head of the Clinical Data Mining Expert Group and a member of the CMURC Business Intelligence Research Committee.
Matt earned his B.A. in Mathematics from Cornell University and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Statistics from Virginia Tech. He is a member of the American Statistical Association and the Drug Information Association. He has taught and directed PERI courses and is a Corporate Partner representative for the Virginia Tech Statistics Department.
Dr. Yves Schabes co-founded Teragram Corporation with Dr. Emmanuel Roche in 1997. Dr. Schabes has spent the past fifteen years working on issues relating to natural language processing and computer science. Dr. Schabes is the author, or editor, of more than fifty international scientific publications, including co-editor, with Emmanuel Roche, of Finite-State Language Processing (1997, MIT Press, Cambridge MA). Dr. Schabes also is an Associate to the Division of Applied Science, Harvard University, Cambridge MA. Prior to founding Teragram, Dr. Schabes was a Senior Scientist at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in Cambridge, MA. He also held a position as a Research Associate at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Schabes has been a program committee member of many international scientific conferences and journals. Dr. Schabes received a Ph.D in 1990 in Computer Science from University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from l'Ecole Supérieure
D'Electricité (France) in 1985.
Marc Schneiderman is CEO and founder of Mobile Agent Technologies. An SAS business partner which designs and builds systems that automate the human decision making process. He is the inventor of AgentOS (tm), a patented mobile agent based distributed computing infrastructure, as well as Common Sense Reasoning (tm), a methodology by which to imbue enterprise software with human like cognitive abilities, such as gut feelings and intuition.
As a member of the SAS Global Technology practice, with a specific focus on Analytics, Sascha Schubert is responsible for the growing the global market share and the strategic development direction of SAS Analytic technologies with a specific focus on data and text mining solutions. He has been involved in many projects involving the application of analytical techniques to address specific business challenges in various industries, including: banking and finance, telecommunications and the public sector.
Schubert supports SAS customers in solving business problems such as: customer attrition and churn, cross-selling, customer segmentation and market basket analysis. Other main areas of his analytical expertise are fraud detection and anti-money laundering. He also provides direction and support to the research and development team to ensure that market requirements are reflected in product development.
Mary Beth Seasholtz has worked for The Dow Chemical Company in Midland, Michigan for 15 years, after earning a Ph.D. in Analytical Chemistry and an M.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Washington, and a B.S. in Chemistry from Lebanon Valley College. Her work in the Dow Corporate Research and Development group has focused on the application of chemometrics methods in manufacturing and research. Along with the publication of more than 25 papers, she is also a co-author of a chemometrics text, "Chemometrics: A Practical Guide".
Professor Simon Sheather is the head of the Department of Statistics at Texas A&M University. Simon's research interests are in the fields of nonparametric and robust statistics. He is also interested in statistical models of wine quality.
Simon has extensive consulting experience, particularly in the application of statistical methods to business situations. He has worked with clients from a range of industries including banking, hospitality, fashion, transport, real estate and consumer products as well as government.
In 2001, Simon was named an honorary fellow of the American Statistical Association. Simon is currently listed on ISIHighlyCited.com among the top one-half of one percent of all mathematical scientists, in terms of citations of his published work.
Simon has served as an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association. In addition, he was the Inaugural Managing Editor and the Theory and Methods Editor of the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Statistics. Simon holds a B Sc (Hons) degree (Melbourne) and a Ph D in Statistics (La Trobe).
Randy Sherrod has a PhD in economics from Penn State, where he specialized in econometrics and industrial organization. Currently he works as a marketing analytics manager at Cisco Systems in San Jose, where he is responsible for econometric, optimization, and forecasting models for the world-wide marketing organization. Previously, Dr. Sherrod worked as a Director of Data Mining & Statistical Analysis at Charles Schwab in San Francisco where he supported marketing mix optimization and predictive modeling. He has also worked in risk management at Wells Fargo and as a survey statistician at the US Census Bureau.
Professor Michael Speed is the Director of Online Learning in the Department of Statistics at Texas A&M University. Mike's research interests are in the fields of linear models and the use of technology in the classroom. As the Associate Dean of Technology Mediated Instruction in the College of Science, he assists the University faculty in improving the learning environment by using technology.
Mike has considerable consulting experience, principally in the application of statistical methods to business, environmental and ecological data. He consults with state and federal agencies as well as individuals and corporations.
In 2006, Mike was named a fellow of the American Statistical Association. He received the Shewell and the Jack Youden awards as well as the H. O. Hartley and the W.S. Connor awards. As a NASA engineer, he received the Sustained Superior Performance Award in 1969.
In addition to the usual service activities to the statistical profession, Mike has been very active in the civic and business community. He has held public offices and has worked on committees at the local, state and national levels. Michael holds a BS and MS degree from St. Mary's University in San Antonio and a Ph. D. from Texas A&M University.
Prior to his time with GWIM, Allen managed GCSBB Segment Analytics and implemented several strategies to improve analyst efficiency. Allen has been with the bank since 1994.
Allen has a BSBA in Finance\Economics and an MBA in Statistics, as well as advanced degrees in Direct Marketing, Application Development, and Client Server Development.
Daniel Thorpe is a Senior Vice President at Wachovia and currently serves as the Director of Statistics and Modeling for the Insight and Innovation Division. Insight and Innovation is a recognized Center of Excellence that is accountable for Wachovia's Innovation efforts and offers rigorous analytical and marketing research around Customer Insight, enabling the development of strategies to acquire, enhance and deepen, and retain customer relationships for Wachovia.
Dr. Thorpe has a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Statistics, all from the University of Minnesota, where his research and focus was in industrial statistics (design of experiments) and inference in small sample sizes. Upon finishing his Ph.D, he took a job with W.L. Gore and Associates, where his areas of contribution varied across product development, employee engagement and in the financial modeling and forecasting of product demand. During this time, he frequently gave presentations and papers on how the statistical community can more effectively partner and collaborate with their business peers.
When joining Wachovia, Dr. Thorpe's focus turned entirely to generating customer insight from the huge amounts of data and information that Wachovia collects. He and his team partner with Wachovia's Line of Business in modeling customer behavior from targeted marketing campaigns to understanding the value of customer loyalty. He was also the project lead on Wachovia's Innovation team ? whose charter is to understand what Innovation is at Wachovia. Currently he is driving Wachovia's Marketing ROI modeling efforts, where he is partnering with Wachovia's Corporate Marketing team. This effort has led to Wachovia winning the 2006 Pepper's and Roger's Impact Award in Customer Strategy, as well as Dr. Thorpe personally receiving a 1 to 1 Customer Champion Award, which recognizes executives who evangelize the customer cause.
A data miner during his final decade at Ford Motor Company, Tuchinsky specialized in warranty analytics in a highly successful business intelligence group. Ford career highlights include Henry Ford Technology Awards in 1985 and 2000. His vita lists hundreds of internal and external publications and presentations. Tuchinsky also has worked with the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) and several Michigan universities on conferences and events that encourage the use of BI technology.
In 2002, Tuchinsky became involved in professional masters-level education in the sciences. He is an industrial advisor to the professional science masters (PSM) degree program in Industrial Mathematics at Michigan State University. He has spoken about the business significance of PSM degrees and the value of hiring PSM graduates in many forums. Tuchinsky serves on the Advisory Board of the Council of Graduate Schools PSM program and is a member of the National Research Council study committee on Enhancing the Master's Degree in the Natural Sciences (report in press). He is also participating in the development of the world's first PSM program in complex adaptive systems, at the University of Michigan.
Tuchinsky completed a B.S. degree in mathematics and physics at Queens College, CUNY in 1966 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in applied mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, in 1968 and 1971.
Dirk Van den Poel is professor of marketing modeling at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of Ghent University, Belgium. He heads a competence center on analytical customer relationship management (aCRM)/customer intelligence/customer data mining. He received his degree of management/business engineer as well as his PhD from K.U.Leuven (Belgium). His main interest fields are the quantitative analysis of consumer behavior (CRM), data mining (genetic algorithms, neural networks, random forests, random multinomial logit: RMNL), text mining, optimal marketing resource allocation (DIMAROPT) and operations research. He published more than 30 articles in academic peer-reviewed journals including Information & Management, Decision Support Systems, Journal of Business Research, European Journal of Operational Research, Journal of the Operational Research Society,
International Journal of Intelligent Systems and Expert Systems with Applications.
He is a 20+ years SAS user, and has been teaching SAS for the past 10 years in the Master of Marketing Analysis. He has given more than 100+ talks at academic conferences as well as business conferences all over the world.
Herna L. Viktor is an associate professor at the School of IT and Engineering (SITE), University of Ottawa, Canada and the director of the Intelligent Decision Support and Data Analysis Lab (IDeAL) at SITE. Her research focuses on the development of new methodologies for the management and data mining of large-scale object-relational databases and data warehouses. The end results of her research have been applied within the Anthropometry, Health Care and Bioinformatics domains. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Stellenbosch, which she received in 1999, has published more that 80 international journal and conference articles and is on a number of international programme committees. Her research is sponsored by the Canadian National Science and Engineering Research council (NSERC), Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and the Ontario Network for Research in e-Commerce (ORNEC).
Dr. Hendrik Wagner is a consultant for risk analytics and assists credit risk departments in Europe and globally in moving towards state-of-the-art credit scoring and internal rating systems in order to increase profitability and assure compliance. From April 1998 ? October 2006 he worked as Product Manager Data Mining and Credit Scoring Solutions at SAS Institute EMEA. He holds a Ph.D in Science Informatics from Bielefeld University.
Richard has worked in financial services database marketing and customer analytics for the past 9 years. Prior to joining Bank of America, he worked in consulting services at CRM companies Knowledge Stream Partners and Xchange, and initially cut his teeth in retail consumer packaged goods analytics working with POS and panel data investigating impacts of pricing and promotions on sales.
Richard holds a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois and and MS in Statistics from the University of Chicago.
Doug Wielenga graduated from Baylor University with masters degrees in Mathematics and Statistics. He has over 12 years of experience solving customer problems using SAS. He joined SAS as part of the Education division where he developed and taught courses using Enterprise Miner. He then moved to SAS Consulting where he worked directly with customers to design and implement strategies for solving business problems using data mining. More recently, he joined SAS Technical Support where he spends the majority of his time on data mining related activities.
Mr. Yan is Senior Lead, Deloitte & Touche LLP. He is in the Actuarial & Insurance Consulting Group and is a member of Human Capital Advisory Services. Mr. Yan has more than 15 years experience in Property and Casualty insurance industry. Mr. Yan joined Deloitte & Touche in 2005. Since then, Mr. Yan has been a leading modeler for many personal lines and commercial lines predictive modeling projects.
Before joining Deloitte, Mr. Yan was a Sr. Research Consultant in Hartford Insurance Group (HIG) for more than seven years. Mr. Yan developed and implemented a sequence of predictive models using cutting-edge multivariate statistical techniques such as GLM for the Hartford's product development. His experience in HIG was developing class plan for personal auto, homeowners, credit scoring, growth and profitability projection, and claim level loss development. He also received numerous awards and nominations for his significant contributions to The Hartford's business.
Prior to his employment in HIG, Mr. Yan was a Senior Actuarial analyst in American States Insurance Companies in Indianapolis. He developed Workers Compensation rating system, return on equity model and an agency management model during his career in American States Insurance. Instructor of 2006 & 2007 Casualty Actuarial Society Limited Attendance Predictive Modeling Seminar. Mr. Yan received his Ph.D. in Statistics Indiana University.
He presented "Different Offset Techniques" in 2007 as a Casualty Actuarial Society Predictive Modeling Seminar. He, also, presented "Pricing Optimization - A Pricing, Underwriting and Marketing Combined Approach", as a 2007 CAS Predictive Modeling Seminar.