IADSS Workshop KDD 2019 Anchorage

Proposed Standards on Definitions of Analytics Roles, Skill-sets and Career Paths in the Data Science Industry

Background, Definition and Audience of the Workshop

As the role of data and analytics is expanding very rapidly in creating new business models or changing existing ones, demand for analytics professionals is growing at an increasing rate. However, almost every company in the industry has a unique way of defining roles and assigning titles in data analytics related positions. For any given role or title, such as ‘Data Scientist’ or ‘Data Mining Manager’, a variety of role definitions, expected hard and soft skills, expected level of experience, level in the organization, or career development plan including training can be seen. This creates inefficiencies and makes it difficult for companies to find the right match for a given position, leverage analytics skills effectively and retain talent. It also makes it hard for professionals to understand what a certain position requires and develop their own development plans. This has resulted in a chaotic market that is confusing to employers, academic and training institutions, and candidates; with a large number of unqualified candidates calling themselves “data scientist” or “analytics professional”.

In order to address this, Initiative for Analytics and Data Science Standards (IADSS) has been launched and has kicked-off a global scale research study. This study aims to gain insight into the analytics profession in the industry and help support the development of standards regarding analytics role definitions, required skills and, career advancement paths. This will help set some industry standards which in turn could support the healthy growth of the analytics market. This research includes a detailed survey for analytics executives and professionals, in-depth interviews with industry leaders and academicians as well as an extensive literature review.

This workshop has the goal of sharing the first proposed standards and formulating a working agenda for the future of this important topic. We aim to announce and communicate the findings and recommendations of the study with the analytics community within this workshop and gather feedback to finalize the research report as well as define the missing components that will enable us to launch a proper set of industry standards. In order to achieve the intended aim, the workshop will be held as a half-day work meeting with short talks and feedback sessions aimed at defining and refining the proposed standards.

This workshop intends to achieve 3 goals:

1. Share the initial findings, learnings, drafts of proposed standards with the workshop attendees

2. Hear summarized input and observations from practitioners, large Analytics/DS employers, and educators on the needs and issues they see

3. Collect feedback on the proposed standards and set a working plan for further development via a Standards Committee and a Steering Committee to guide the ongoing effort.

The Format of the Proposed Workshop

This workshop is intended to achieve 3 goals:

Share the initial findings, learnings, drafts of proposed standards with the workshop attendees
Hear summarized input and observations from practitioners, large Analytics/DS employers, and educators on the needs and issues they see
Collect feedback on the proposed standards and set a working plan for further development via a Standards Committee and a Steering Committee to guide the ongoing effort.

Agenda of the Workshop

Click here to see presentation topics of invited speakers

The Workshop Presentations

Workshop Organizers

Workshop Chair: Usama Fayyad: Open Insights (USA); Email: (usama@open-insights.com), Tel: +1-408-242-8268

Workshop co-organizer: Hamit Hamutcu: Co-founder – Analytics Center (hhamutcu@analyticscenter.com) Tel: +1-617-309-8426

Usama M. Fayyad, Ph.D.

Usama serves as founder/CEO of Open Insights (founded in 2008) where he works with large and small enterprises on AI/Machine Learning, BigData strategy, and launching new business models based on Data Assets: Most recently serving as Interim CTO for Stella.AI, a VC-funded startup in AI for HR/recruiting; and Interim COTO of MTN2.0 – helping develop new revenue streams in mobile payments/MFS and Data-as-a-Service businesses at MTN, Africa’s largest mobile operator.

Usama was the first Global Chief Data Officer & Group Managing Director at Barclays in London (2013-2016) where he also took on additional role as CIO of Risk, Finance & Treasury Technology in 2015. From 2010-2013 Usama was co-founder of OASIS-500, a tech startup investment fund, following his appointment as Founding Executive Chairman in 2010 by King Abdullah II of Jordan. Up until joining Barclays in 2013 he was also Chairman, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Blue Kangaroo Corp building a mobile search engine service for offers personalization and activation based in Silicon Valley. His background includes Chairman/CEO roles at several startups, including DMX Group (acquired by Yahoo!) and digiMine (Audience Science) which was founded in 2000 in Seattle to build hosted data warehousing and data mining solutions for Fortune 500 companies.

He was the first person ever to hold the Chief Data Officer (CDO) title when Yahoo! acquired his second startup in 2004. In addition to CDO he was also Executive VP of Research and Strategic Data Solutions where he ran Yahoo!'s global data strategy, architecting its data policies and systems, and managing its data analytics and data processing infrastructure. The data teams he built at Yahoo! collected, managed, and processed over 25 terabytes of data per day, and drove a major part of ad targeting revenue and data insights businesses globally. He also founded Yahoo! Research Labs where much of the early work on BigData made it to open source and established the early collaborations that launched Hadoop and other open source contributions.

Usama held leadership roles at Microsoft (1996-2000) and founded the machine learning systems group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (1989-1995) where his work on machine learning resulted in the top Excellence in Research award from Caltech, and a U.S. Government medal from NASA.

Usama earned his Ph.D. in engineering in AI/Machine Learning from the University of Michigan. He holds two BSE’s in Engineering, MSE Computer Engineering and M.Sc. in Mathematics. He has published over 100 technical articles on data mining, data science, AI/ML, and databases; and holds over 30 patents, is a Fellow of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM). He is active in the academic community with several adjunct professor posts and is the only person to receive both the ACM’s SIGKDD Innovation Award (2007) and Service Award (2003). He has edited two influential books on data mining and served as editor-in-chief on two key industry journals. He is an active angel investor and advisor in many early-stage tech startups across the U.S., Europe and the Middle East. He served on the boards or advisory boards of several private and public companies including: Criteo, Invensense, RapidMiner, Stella.AI, Martini Media, Virsec, Silniva, Abe.AI, Medio, NetSeer, Choicestream, and others. On the academic front his is on advisory boards of the Data Science Institute at Imperial College, AAI at UTS, and The University of Michigan College of Engineering.

Hamit Hamutcu

Hamit has over 20 years of industry and consulting experience in the areas of analytics, customer relationship management and marketing strategies driven by data. He is a co-Founder of Analytics Center, a company focused on the use of data and analytics in business as well as an advisor or investor in several analytics related initiatives that work in developing vertical machine learning solutions for industries such as advertising and e-commerce.

Hamit was a Founding Partner of the Istanbul office for Peppers & Rogers Group, the leading customer-led business strategy consulting firm based in the U.S. He then led the development of the firm in the EMEA region by opening offices and serving clients across the Middle East, Africa and Europe. He also worked as a Partner for the firm’s US office heading up its global Analytics group. In this capacity he oversaw the growth of the analytics practice and helped his clients develop analytics functions, build data infrastructure and deploy analytical models to support business goals. His industry experience includes several positions within Federal Express in Memphis in marketing analytics, and technology where he led IT and business teams to leverage the enormous amount of data the company generated to serve its customers better.

At Analytics Center, Hamit also organizes one of the leading analytics conferences - smartcon - held in Istanbul and Dubai since 2015 and attracting thousands of attendees from the Middle East, EU, Turkey. The summits achieved great success with the support of well-known global thought leaders from institutions like MIT, Stanford, Barclays, Amazon, Cloudera, Hyperloop, and several local/regional institutions in Turkey and the Middle East.

Hamit is a frequent speaker, writer and board member at various start-ups and non-profit organizations. He earned his B.Sc. degree in Electronics Engineering at Bogazici University in Istanbul and his MBA degree at the University of Florida.

Full contact info of Workshop chair:

Usama Fayyad, Ph.D. (usama@open-insights.com), CEO, Open Insights, LLC (www.open-insights.com)

cell: +1.408.242.8268 - office: +1-206-529-5123 – London: +44-7900738337

EA: Geraldine +44-7713-064911 or +1-415.570.4634 – Geraldine@open-insights.com

assistant: Lena +1-415-429-5640 – Lena@open-insights.com