Dr. Joydeep Ghosh’s class was one of my favorite classes from the program thus far. His Advanced Predictive Modeling course is integral in my opinion to my success both in the program and outside of the program. His research was interesting, and when I saw he was slated to give a talk to Austin’s Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (ACM KDD for short- because the full title is a mouthful) MeetUp on personalized healthcare I jumped at the opportunity to check it out.
Dr. Ghosh’s talk took place in the incredibly cool Homeaway Office. The walls lined with photos of Austin landmarks, like Deep Eddy (the pool not the vodka), The Broken Spoke, and one of my personal favorite- Sandy’s Burgers and Frozen Custard signs. Homeaway was gracious enough to cater some delicious Mexican food (and free beer), for the talk. I and a few other students had the opportunity to mix and mingle with Austin-based analytics professionals, and people interested in Healthcare. This was my 4th or 5th meet-up with KDD crowd, but first topic discussion as opposed to a training.
Dr. Ghosh delivered his talk entitled “Towards Personalized Medicine: Building Predictive Models for ‘Segment of One’” The talk was interesting and engaging. Dr. Ghosh explained that it was going to be less technical in terms of the algorithms being used, but more general in terms of direction of the field. The talk was engaging for people of various knowledge and skill levels; and we also managed to get him to talk about some of the math. There was some extended back and forth on the current testing procedures, and the need for an updated standard in the medical field.
All in all- the talk was a great way to start off the winter holiday. Sure it’s not everyone’s idea of “fun” to spend more time going to what some might view as a lecture- but Dr. Ghosh was able to deliver an engaging and interesting talk, surrounding the future of one of the fastest growing analytics fields that didn’t feel like a lecture. (Brief disclaimer- I enjoyed his lectures so I might not be the person to ask). I might be a nerd, but fajitas, beer and an engaging talk about one of the fastest growing analytics fields sounds like a pretty fun evening to me.
If you’re interested in getting involved in ACM KDD check out their meet-up page here, and keep an eye out for their Python training, Hadoop training, and upcoming Invited Speaker Series with Dr. Grauman on Computer Vision & Machine Learning for Vision Search and Object Recognition.
–Greg Merchant
Greg Merchant is a current MSBA candidate who graduated from undergrad in Finance and Business Honors at UT. He worked in financial modeling and advertising analytics before joining the program.
Dr. Joydeep Ghosh teaches Advanced Predictive Modeling (One of the most important courses in the program) in the fall semester. You can learn more about him at http://www.ece.utexas.edu/people/faculty/joydeep-ghosh
“Picture courtesy : Austin-ACM-SIGKDD”