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Past Events

Elder Research sponsors many international conferences and corporate events and members of our team frequently deliver keynotes at major global analytics conferences. Here is a list of some past events we have supported.

2022

John Elder to Teach "The Best of Predictive Analytics" Workshops at Machine Learning Week 2022

The Best of Predictive Analytics: Core Machine Learning and Data Science Techniques

Monday, June 20, 2022 – Caesars Palace, Las Vegas
Full day: 8:30am – 4:30pm PDT

Workshop Description

This one-day session surveys standard and advanced methods for predictive modeling (aka machine learning).

Predictive analytics has proven capable of generating enormous returns across industries – but, with so many machine learning modeling methods, there are some tough questions that need answering:

  • How do you pick the right one to deliver the greatest impact for your business, as applied over your data?
  • What are the best practices along the way?
  • How do you make it sure it works on new data?

In this workshop, renowned practitioner and hugely popular instructor Dr. John Elder will describe the key inner workings of leading machine learning algorithms, demonstrate their performance with business case studies, compare their merits, and show you how to select the method and tool best suited to each predictive analytics project.

Attendees will leave with an understanding of the most popular algorithms, including classical regression, decision trees, nearest neighbors, and neural networks, as well as breakthrough ensemble methods such as bagging, boosting, and random forests.

This workshop will also cover useful ways to visualize, select, reduce, and engineer features – such as principal components and projection pursuit. Most importantly, Dr. Elder reveals how the essential resampling techniques of cross-validation and bootstrapping make your models robust and reliable.

Throughout the workshop day, Dr. Elder will share his (often humorous) stories from real-world applications, highlighting mistakes to avoid.

If you’d like to become a practitioner of predictive analytics – or if you already are and would like to hone your knowledge across methods and best practices – this workshop is for you.

What you will learn:

  • The tremendous value of learning from data
  • How to create valuable predictive models with machine learning for your business
  • Best Practices, with real-world stories of what happens when things go wrong

[06-20-2022]

Shree Taylor was a panel member at George Mason University's, Acquisition Next: Artificial Intelligence Symposium

The event features two panels composed of industry and government experts, Buying AI: Industry Challenges and Buying AI: Current Government Practices, as well as lunch, a keynote speaker, opportunities to network, and tours of the Institute for Digital InnovAtion facilities. The two discussion panels will be led by knowledgeable moderators to create a rich, interactive environment for speakers and registrants.

The first panel, Buying AI: Industry Challenges, will discuss the challenges of AI procurement from an industry perspective. This panel consists of representatives from both small and traditional firms who will speak about their challenges as developers and suppliers of AI tools purchased by the U.S. government.

Panel Members: 

  • Dr. Shree Taylor – Vice President of Government Analytics & Innovation at Elder Research Inc.
  • Josh Wilson – Senior Vice President of Services and Technology at LMI
  • Alexis Bonnell – Senior Business Executive: Emerging Technology Evangelist at Google
  • Kristen Summers – Business Unit CTO at Microsoft Federal

Moderator: Benjamrin McMartin, Esq. – Senior Fellow at GMU Center for Government Contracting

The second panel, Buying AI: Current Government Practices, will focus on current practices used by U.S. government agencies to purchase AI tools. This panel is composed of government representatives who can offer first-hand accounts of the evolving state of AI acquisition and adoption in the federal government. Both panels will touch on topics central to the symposium theme, including intellectual property issues, ethics, and cyber-security concerns.

Panel Members:

  • Major Andrew Bowne – Chief Legal Counsel at DAF-MIT AI Accelerator
  • Azza Jayaprakash – Counsel at Intellectual Property Cadre at the Office of the USD (Acquisition & Sustainment), U.S. Department of Defense
  • COL Matthew Benigni, PhD – Chief Data Officer and Director, Data and Decision Sciences Directorate (DDSD) at U.S. Army Futures Command
  • Deniece Peterson – Sr. Director of Federal Market Analysis at Deltek

Moderator: Dr. Jerry McGinn – Executive Director at GMU Center for Government Contracting

For more information and to register, visit: Acquisition Next: Artificial Intelligence

[05-05-2022]

Grant Fleming to present AI Alignment Considerations for Data Science Practitioners

Grant Fleming to present AI Alignment Considerations for Data Science Practitioners

Accounts of AI algorithms making biased, unfair, or otherwise harmful predictions are capturing growing attention from the media, institutional researchers, and the public at large. In the vast majority of cases, these harmful predictions arise as the unanticipated and unintended consequence of using large, highly complex model to solve poorly specified tasks. Research around solving this “AI alignment problem” between the results desired and actually produced is quite nascent. Fortunately, this research has already yielded some best practices and software tools that practitioners can begin utilizing in their own workflows. This session will discuss a selection of best practices and software tools to mitigate the risks of harmful predictions in certain classification and NLP contexts.

For more information about this event and UMBC’s Data Science program.

[03-04-2022]

2021

John Elder Will Deliver a Special Plenary Talk at Predictive Analytics World 2021

John Elder delivered a virtual special plenary talk at the Predictive Analytics World  Machine Learning Week. Machine Learning Week includes eight tracks of sessions covering the commercial deployment of machine learning.

[05-26-2021]

Ramon Perez to Speak at PAW Industry 4.0

Ramon Perez, Director UK Operations, and Sira-Kvina kraftselkap, a large Norwegian power producer, presented a case study on deep learning models developed and deployed as part of a predictive maintenance solution to identify likely component failures within hydroelectric generator and turbine systems. In this session, he discussed the design concept, modeling approach, solution architecture, and how it is implemented as part of the maintenance team workflow. He also explained what makes machine learning so challenging in the utilities industry where labeled cases are in short supply.

[05-25-2021]

John Elder to Teach a 1-Day Virtual Workshop on "The Top 12 Analytics Mistakes"

John Elder taught a 1-day workshop at Machine Learning Week on “The Deadly Dozen: The Top 12 Analytics Mistakes and the Techniques to Defeat Them“. This one-day session revealed the subtle mistakes analytics practitioners often make when facing a new challenge (the “deadly dozen”), and clearly explained the advanced methods seasoned experts use to avoid those pitfalls and build accurate and reliable models.

[05-21-2021]

John Elder to Teach a 1-Day Workshop on "The Best of Predictive Analytics"

John Elder taught a 1-day virtual workshop at Machine Learning Week on “The Best of Predictive Analytics: Core Machine Learning and Data Science Techniques. This one-day session surveyed standard and advanced methods for predictive modeling (aka machine learning).

[05-19-2021]

Elder Research at ASA Data Science Virtual Career Information Fair

Daniel Brannock and Kimberly Keiter represented Elder Research at the North Carolina Chapter of the American Statistical Association (ASA)’s Statistics and Data Science Virtual Career Information Fair.

[04-13-2021]

John Elder to Lecture at UVA Darden School of Business

John Elder delivered a virtual lecture on “How to Know if Your Discovery is Real” to the MBA students in Professor Lichtendahl’s class “Hot Topics in Analytics” at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. The lecture explored how to know if your discovery is real, or luck, or a result of “torturing the data until it confessed”.

[03-30-2021]

Elder Research to Sponsor the UVA Link Lab Flash Talk Series

Elder Research was proud to sponsor the University of Virginia Link Lab Flash Talk series. Elder Research is an industry affiliate sponsor of the Link Lab, an interdisciplinary, cyber-physical systems research center hosted at UVA. During this one hour session, PhD students from the Link Lab provided two-minute synopses of their research on difficult problems in Autonomous Systems, Connected Health, Smart Cities, and Hardware for IoT.

[03-04-2021]

John Elder to Present to The Department of Statistical Science at Duke

John Elder will deliver the virtual talk “Top 3 Things I’ve Learned in 3 Decades Of Data Science” to the students in the Department of Statistical Science at Duke University on February 17, 2021. John says “the three most important analytic innovations [he’s] seen in three decades of extracting useful information from data have to do with Ensemble models, Target Shuffling, and Cognitive Biases.

[02-17-2021]

Dr. Jennifer Schaff Presents at Partnering with the Public for Biomedical Research Seminar

Dr. Jennifer Schaff joined Larsson Omberg, Sage Bionetworks, to present on the “Life Cycle of the mPower Public Researcher Portal“, one of the first large-scale attempts to assess the feasibility of quantifying Parkinson disease symptoms and their changes in a real-world setting.

The new seminar series “Partnering with the Public for Biomedical Research” was hosted by the NIH Citizen Science Working Group and sponsored by the NIH Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS).

[01-26-2021]

Grant Fleming to Speak at the RStudio Global 2021 Conference

Grant Fleming delivered a talk on “Fairness and Data Science: Failures, Factors, and Futures” at the virtual RStudio::Global 2021 Conference.

Session Abstract: In recent years, numerous highly publicized failures in data science have made evident that biases or issues of fairness in training data can sneak into, and be magnified by, our models, leading to harmful, incorrect predictions being made once the models are deployed into the real world. But what actually constitutes an unfiar or biased model, and how can we diagnose and address these issues within our own work? In this talk, I will present a framework for better understanding how issues of fairness overlap with data science as well as how we can improve our modeling pipelines to make them more interpretable, reproducible, and fair to the groups that they are intended to serve. We will explore this new framework together through an analysis of ProPublica’s COMPAS recidivism dataset using the tidymodels, drake, and iml packages.

[01-21-2021]

2020

John Elder Presented at the Army/DSA Innovation Council

John F. Elder IV, Ph.D. gave a talk on “Even Powerful Science will Fail without Innovative and Honest Culture” at the Army/DSA Innovation Council.

[06-24-2020]

John Elder Delivered a Talk at the Predictive Analytics World for Business Conference

John Elder delivered a virtual special plenary talk “The Top 3 Innovations In Analytics I’ve Seen” at the Predictive Analytics World for Business conference originally scheduled for Las Vegas.

[06-20-2020]

Wayne Folta Taught a Course on Analyzing and Modeling Coronavirus Data

Lead Data Scientist Wayne Folta was an instructor for the “Analyzing and Modeling Coronavirus Data” course offered by Statistics.com. The course covered both epidemiological models and statistical models used to forecast COVID-19 pandemic data.

[06-12-2020]

John Elder Taught a 1-Day Workshop at Machine Learning Week

John Elder taught a 1-day workshop at Machine Learning Week on “The Deadly Dozen: The Top 12 Analytics Mistakes and the Techniques to Defeat Them” in Las Vegas.

[06-04-2020]

John Elder taught a 1-Day Workshop at Machine Learning Week

John Elder taught a 1-day workshop at Machine Learning Week on “The Best of Predictive Analytics: Core Machine Learning and Data Science Techniques” originally scheduled for Las Vegas.

[06-01-2020]

John Elder Lectured at the the University of Virginia Darden School of Business

John Elder lectured on “What Data Results are Real?” to the MBA students in Professor Bodily’s class “Hot Topics in Analytics” at the the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. The lecture explored how to know if your discovery is real, or luck, or a result of torturing the data until it confessed.

[04-13-2020]

Jeff Deal Lectured at Clemson University

Jeff Deal lectured on “Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare” to the nursing students at Clemson University. The lecture explored using big data, machine learning, predictive analytics, and Artificial Intelligence in health care.

[04-02-2020]

Dr. William Goodrum Was a Panelist at UVA Debate Night

Dr. William Goodrum was a panelist at Debate Night: Data Privacy in a Sensor-filled World hosted by the Science Policy Initiative at the University of Virginia Link Lab.

[02-27-2020]

2019

Dr. Carl Hoover taught a workshop on "Intervention and Prioritization Analytics" for the Air Force Research Lab, Strategic Development, Planning and Execution Office. Dr. Hoover's session was part of the "Predictive Analytics for Integrated Assessment of Peer Response Workshop" in Dayton, OH. The event aimed to generate concepts to predict the tactical and strategic actions of adversaries, supporting the U.S. Air Force’s ability to uphold the National Defense Strategy.

[03-22-2019]

John Elder Taught a Workshop on "The Deadly Dozen" at Predictive Analytics World for Government

John Elder taught a 1-day workshop at Predictive Analytics World for Government on “The Deadly Dozen: The Top 12 Analytics Mistakes and the Techniques to Defeat Them” in Las Vegas, NV.

[06-20-2019]

Gerhard Pilcher Delivered the Keynote Address at the Predictive Analytics World for Healthcare

Gerhard Pilcher delivered the keynote address Developing a Data Strategy for Health Care Organizations: Techniques and Tips for Improved Organizational Performance and Better Patient Outcomes” at the Predictive Analytics World for Healthcare conference in Las Vegas.

[06-19-2019]

John Elder Delivered a Talk "Against All Odds: The Slow, Startling Triumph of Reverend Bayes" at PAW for Business and Industry 4.0

John Elder delivered a special plenary talk “Against All Odds: The Slow, Startling Triumph of Reverend Bayes” at the Predictive Analytics World for Business and Industry 4.0 conference in Las Vegas.

[06-19-2019]

John Elder Taught a Workshop on "The Best of Predictive Analytics" at the Predictive Analytics World

John Elder taught a 1-day workshop at the Predictive Analytics World mega conference on “The Best of Predictive Analytics: Core Machine Learning and Data Science Techniques” in Las Vegas, NV.

[06-17-2019]

Dr. Carl Hoover and Dustin Hux Taught a Workshop at the Intelligence Analytics 2019 Summit

Dr. Carl Hoover and Dustin Hux taught a workshop on “Overcoming Challenges With Large Quantities Of Information In Order To Leverage The Future Of Analytics In The IC” at the Intelligence Analytics 2019 Summit in Washington, DC. This workshop focused on researching and developing different strategies for using analytics, new ways to process information, and organizing data across all platforms.

[05-29-2019]

Gerhard Pilcher Spoke to Senior Law Enforcement Executives at the Senior Leader Learning Lab

Gerhard Pilcher spoke to Senior Law Enforcement Executives at the Senior Leader Learning Lab hosted by the Michigan Healthcare Cybersecurity Council in Holland, Michigan. This four hour “immersion” course was designed to help C-Suite Leaders and Boards of Directors develop a practical understanding of the business value of data science, data mining, and predictive analytics.

[05-17-2019]

Gerhard Pilcher Delivered the Keynote at NC State Alumni Weekend

Gerhard Pilcher  delivered the keynote “Growth and Transformation as a Professional in a Rapidly-changing Industry” at NC State University’s Alumni Weekend.

[04-27-2019]

Dr. William Goodrum and Carlos Blancarte Spoke at the Tom Tom Applied Machine Learning Conference

Dr. William Goodrum, Carlos Blancarte, and UVA student Henry Harris spoke at the Tom Tom Applied Machine Learning  conference on “Automated Time-Series Model Selection at Scale” in Charlottesville, VA. The talk was a walk through of the framework that Elder Research implemented in R and Spark for a global logistics company to automate the production of over 35 million forecasts weekly.

[04-11-2019]

Jeff Deal Spoke at the James Madison University College of Business

Jeff Deal spoke on “Top 10 Analytics Business Mistakes: Identifying Why Projects Fail” to the James Madison University College of Business. This talk focused on the business pitfalls of managing an analytics engagement and addressed leading organizational and management errors made by the client or the consulting firm and illustrated some with real-world examples.

[04-10-2019]

John Elder and Jennifer Schaff spoke at the NC State Institute for Advanced Analytics Employer Information Session

John Elder and Jennifer Schaff spoke to students attending an NC State Institute for Advanced Analytics Employer Information Session about Elder Research’s mission, values, and what it looks like to work at Elder Research.

[04-05-2019]

LeAnna Kent Spoke on "Network Analysis to Detect Kickback Schemes Among Medical Providers" at MLconf

Data Scientist LeAnna Kent spoke at MLconf on “Network Analysis to Detect Kickback Schemes Among Medical Providers” in New York City. Her talk covered how Elder Research created a custom formula to highlight the strongest connections in an egonet, and how it allowed us to score and rank the resulting subgraphs for investigation prioritization.

[03-29-2019]

Victor Diloreto was a Featured Speaker on Carahsoft's Google Cloud Webinar

Victor Diloreto, Director of Software Products at Elder Research, was a featured speaker on Carahsoft’s Google Cloud webinar “Enhance Data Efficiency: Eliminate Fraud, Waste, and Abuse with Google Cloud”.

[03-19-2019]

John Elder Spoke to the OSF Healthcare Leadership Team

John Elder spoke to the OSF Healthcare leadership team.  OSF HealthCare is an integrated health care network serving patients of all ages across Illinois and Michigan.

[02-21-2019]

John Elder Spoke at the University of Virginia Data Science Institute

John Elder spoke on “Luck, Skill, or Torture? How Target Shuffling Can Tell” to data science students at the University of Virginia Data Science Institute.

[02-13-2019]

Isaiah Goodall and Dr. Jennifer Schaff Spoke at the North Carolina Healthcare Information and Communications Alliance CIO/CMIO Roundtable

Isaiah Goodall and Dr. Jennifer Schaff spoke at the North Carolina Healthcare Information and Communications Alliance CIO/CMIO Roundtable. The event openly discussed problems and solutions related to IT and analytics in healthcare.

[01-09-2019]

2018

Robert Han Spoke at the ACFE Global Fraud  Conference

Robert Han spoke on “Social network Analysis and Data Science for Fraud Detection” at the ACFE Global Fraud  conference in Las Vegas. This session explored how Elder Research applied data science techniques and graph database technology at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to identify networks of tax preparers working together based on information appearing on tax returns.

[06-19-2018]

Dustin Hux and Jeff Whittemore Participated in the Commonwealth Conference on National Defense and Intelligence

Dustin Hux and Jeff Whittemore participated in the Commonwealth Conference on National Defense and Intelligence in Charlottesville, VA. This year’s theme was Resilience for National Security.

[06-12-2018]

Elder Research Sponsored the Predictive Analytics World for Healthcare Conference

Elder Research sponsored the Predictive Analytics World for Healthcare conference in Las Vegas.

[06-07-2018]

John Elder Taught a Workshop at Predictive Analytics World Las Vegas

John Elder taught a 1-day workshop at Predictive Analytics World Las Vegas on “The Deadly Dozen: The Top 12 Analytics Mistakes and the Techniques to Defeat Them” at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

[06-07-2018]

Gerhard Pilcher Spoke at Innovate with Analytics

Elder Research CEO Gerhard Pilcher spoke on “AI Needs HI to Succeed” at the Innovate with Analytics: The Art of Deeper Insights CIO breakfast event in Sydney, Australia.

[06-05-2018]

John Elder Delivered the Keynote Address at Predictive Analytics World for Business

John Elder delivered the keynote address “The Greatest Science” at the Predictive Analytics World for Business conference in Las Vegas.

[06-05-2018]

John Elder Taught a Workshop at Predictive Analytics World Las Vegas

John Elder taught a 1-day workshop at Predictive Analytics World Las Vegas on “The Best of Predictive Analytics: Core Machine Learning and Data Science Techniques” at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

[06-04-2018]

Elder Research Participated in the Alternative Investment Conference

John Elder and Jordan Barr participated in the Alternative Investment Conference hosted by Piedmont Fund Services in Charlottesville, VA.

[05-31-2018]

Gerhard Pilcher was a Panelist Discussing "AI for Data Analysis"

Gerhard Pilcher joined other thought leaders in a panel discussion on “AI for Data Analysis” at the STEP Workshop on AI Adoption Reshaping the Cyber Domain in McLean, VA.

[05-30-2018]

John Elder Spoke at Analytics Summit 2018

John Elder spoke on “What to Optimize? The Heart of Every Analytics Problem” at Analytics Summit 2018 presented by the University of Cincinnati Center for Business Analytics.

[05-16-2018]

John Elder Taught a Data Mining Workshop at Analytics Summit 2018

John Elder taught a 2-day Data Mining Workshop at Analytics Summit 2018 presented by the University of Cincinnati Center for Business Analytics.

[05-15-2018]

Gerhard Pilcher Spoke at the Manulife 2018 US Analytics Conference

Elder Research CEO Gerhard Pilcher spoke at the Manulife 2018 US Analytics conference on “The Gap: Is It Leadership” in Boston.

[05-10-2018]

Elder Research Sponsored the UVA Conference on Systems Engineering Research

Elder Research sponsored the Conference on Systems Engineering Research (CSER 2018) at the University of Virginia. The “Systems in Context” theme was inclusive of topics across all aspects of systems and industrial engineering and related fields.

[05-09-2018]

John Elder Spoke at UVA Hot Topics in Analytics

John Elder spoke on “How to Know What is Real” for Professor Bodily’s class “Hot Topics in Analytics” at the the University of Virginia Darden School of Business.

[04-17-2018]

Dr. Miriam Friedel was an Expert Panelist at the TomTom Founders Summit

Director and Senior Scientist Dr. Miriam Friedel was an expert panel member discussing “The Future of Patient Care” in the Medicine and Biotech track at the TomTom Founders Summit in Charlottesville, VA.

[04-12-2018]

John Elder  delivered the keynote address on “The Data Science Revolution in Industry” at the Elon University Business Analytics Conference “Analytics in Action: Trends You Need to Know” at the SAS Executive Briefing Center in Cary, NC.

[04-05-2018]

John Elder Lectured at Radford University

John Elder lectured on  “A Day In The Life Of A Data Miner” for Professor Pittges’s Data Warehousing, Mining, and Reporting class at Radford University.

[04-04-2018]

Robert Han and Ryan McGibony Presented a Webinar on Identifying Fraud

Fraud is often perpetrated by groups working together. Fraud analytics uses data to detect fraud these rings. Robert Han and Ryan McGibony presented a webinar on identifying suspicious behavior using network analysis tools such as graph databases.

[03-08-2018]

Elder Research Exhibited at the RegTech Data Summit

Elder Research exhibited at the RegTech Data Summit which connects agency leaders, Congress, regulated industries, and tech companies to work together to define the future of this emerging policy area. RegTech solutions can enable automation, reduce fraud, and cut compliance costs.

[03-07-2018]

2017

John Elder Delivered the Keynote Address at NASA's JSC Data Science Day 2.0

John Elder delivered the keynote address “Luck, Skill, or Torture? How Target Shuffling Can Tell” at NASA’s JSC Data Science Day 2.0. The event was designed to share knowledge and provide training on how data analysis and visualization are used in our everyday lives.

[04-26-2017]

Carl Hoover Taught a Workshop at Predictive Analytics World for Government

Carl Hoover was a guest lecturer at the University of Virginia’s STAT4995 Statistics Consulting class.

[04-17-2017]

Dr. Andrew Fast Spoke at the Tom Tom Founders Festival Machine Learning Conference

Dr. Andrew Fast, Chief Scientist, Elder Research spoke at the Tom Tom Founders Festival Machine Learning Conference on “Using Data Science to Ask Why: A Brief introduction to Causal Modeling”.

[04-13-2017]

John Elder and Bryan Jones Were Panelists on DorobekINSIDER LIVE Webinar

John Elder and Bryan Jones were members of a panel of analytics experts discussing “Why Analytics Matters for Government” on a webinar hosted by GovLoop’s DorobekINSIDER LIVE.

[04-12-2017]