Abstract: 

The Ignite session comprises of five 7-minute talks by women in data science participating in ODSC, on technical topics. Back-to-back talks presented on a variety of topics from women speakers from diverse industry and academic backgrounds. Selected talks are:

Drawing Insights with NLP by Lenka Kovalcinova, PhD
Barriers ARE Opportunities; A Primer on Driving Data Science in Highly Regulated Industries by Jamie Warner
Integrating Data Into Marketing Campaigns and Strategies by Damilola Adeyemi
Classification of Alzheimer's Disease from Speech and Language by Jekaterina Novikova, PhD

The session is being moderated by Anoush Najarian, Engineering Manager, MathWorks

Bio: 

Lenka is a UX Quantitative Researcher at Google focusing on improving User Experience in Ads. She earned her Masters degree in Mathematics at Comenius University in Slovakia and continued her doctoral studies in Applied Mathematics at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). Prior to Google, Lenka worked as a postdoctoral researcher at NJIT, secured fellowship with the Insight Data Science program and consulted for startup Sli.do as a machine learning specialist.

Jamie Warner is the Director of Data Science for Lincoln Financials’ Life Solutions Business, where she seeks to revolutionize the way heavily regulated industries understand and adopt data science. She’s led of creation of large scale pricing and reserving models for insurers, and teaches courses to empower stakeholders across the insurance industry by helping them develop a deep understanding of advanced terminology and concepts to facilitate collaboration with data scientists in developing advanced analytical solutions.

Damilola Adeyemi is a data analyst at Bravo Group, a public relations company based in Pennsylvania. She graduated with a First class honors from Covenant University with a Bachelor of Science in Economics and earned a Master of Science in Applied Analytics from Columbia University. She contributes her expertise to meet the data needs of clients from different industries at Bravo Group, discovering and delivering actionable insights and she thirsts for innovative ways to deliver data in the marketing and public relations field. Outside her field as a data analyst, she enjoys baking desserts and cooking continental dishes. She loves to travel and has been to 3 continents - Europe, Africa and North America and hopes to tour the rest of the world.

Jekaterina Novikova is a Director of Machine Learning at Winterlight Labs. Winterlight Labs is a Toronto-based Canadian company that is developing a novel AI-based diagnostic platform that can objectively assess and monitor cognitive health. Jekaterina's work explores artificial intelligence in the context of language understanding, characterising speaker's cognitive, acoustic and linguistic state, as well as in the context of human-machine interaction. Jekaterina received a PhD in Computer Science in 2015 from the University of Bath, UK. More information on Jekaterina's research can be found at: http://jeknov.tumblr.com