We’re excited to announced the first round of gReat speakers for San Francisco EARL. Alongside our keynote speakers, Hilary Parker and Ricardo Bion, R Users from a range of industries will share their R stories. Take a look at our line up so far:

Szilard Pafka, Epoch
Szilard studied physics in the 90s and obtained a PhD by using statistical methods to analyze the risk of financial portfolios. He has worked in a bank quantifying and managing market risk. His main tool for data analysis for the last 10 years has been R. He is also the founder/organizer of the Los Angeles R meetup and the data science community website datascience.la.

Gergely Daroczi, CARD.com
Gergely is an enthusiast R user and package developer. He is also founder of an R-based web application at rapporter.net, PhD candidate in Sociology, and working as the Lead R Developer and Director of Analytics at CARD.com in Los Angeles. He has a strong interest in designing a scalable data platform built on the top of a dozen APIs, stream processing and a lot of R.

Matt Dancho, Business Science
Matt is a management professional with a background in engineering, sales and data science. He leads development efforts for products and services for Business Science, open source software for business and financial analysis. He has degrees Mechanical Engineering, Business Administration and Industrial Engineering. Loves working on software projects and traveling the world with his wife!

JS Tan, Microsoft
JS is a Program Manager on Microsoft’s Azure Big Compute Team. His focus is on providing HPC capabilities in Azure as well as other kinds of compute intensive workloads. He is currently working on enabling distributed computing frameworks in both R and Python on their infrastructure and has an interest in workloads like financial modeling and risk analytics.

Ari Lamstein, Lamstein Consulting LLC
Ari is an R trainer and consultant located in San Francisco. He is the author of several popular R packages, most notably choroplethr. He also runs ProfitablePortfolios.co, a website that helps data scientists build portfolios that improve their careers.

Ali Marami, R-Brain
Ali has a PhD in Finance from University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland and a degree in electrical engineering. He has extensive experience in financial and quantitative modeling and financial risk management in several US banks. Currently, He is a Data Science Advisor at R-Brain Inc.

Dr Mohammed Zakaria, Catapult Sports
Mohammed is a Data Scientist at Catapult Sports, a global leader in wearable sports technology. He works on harnessing the power of data obtained from Catapult devices to create solutions for sports, such as baseball and football, through machine learning. Mohammed holds a PhD in particle physics and as part of his post doctoral training, he studied the strong nuclear force of the collisions made at Large Hadron Collider.

Dr Chris Boosalis, Sacramento State University
Chris has worked in higher education for 20 years. His focus is on building better programmatic and curricular assessment methods using opensource software, shared code, and non-proprietary tools. He is currently working with R, R-Studio and Shiny to create dashboards that offer faculty and administrators insights into how changes affect both student self-perceptions and objective performance.

Want to join the line up? It’s not too late to submit your abstract – the deadline has been extended to 14 April – submit here.