With the launch of CSE's first major/minor program in Data Science this fall, and the forthcoming launch of a new institute devoted to the subject, CSE Prof. Rajesh Gupta invited a leading expert to give the CSE community some insights into the field based on Dr. Waqar Hasan three decades of experience in the data-science industry. Now a Senior Vice President at Oracle Corporation, Hasan has responsibility for the company's analytics products.
Topic: The talk on "A Perspective on Data Science" is Hasan's attempt to provide a perspective on the emerging area of Data Sciences with a retrospective informed by 30 years of experiences in the trenches at Yahoo!, Visa, InsightOne (now a part of Google) and now Oracle. Specifically, he will give examples of hard problems and the need for talent and solutions to make meaningful practical advances in the area.
The talk will be conversational with the goal of creating a dialogue that ties technical advances to industry practice.
Bio: Prior to become SVP for analytics products at Oracle, Waqar Hasan was Senior Vice President of Data at Visa, with responsibility for Visa’s data platform and data-driven products targeted at 15,000 banks, 40 million merchants and 2 billion consumers in areas like risk and fraud management, loyalty and business intelligence. He was the founder and CEO of InsightsOne, a big-data predictive analytics startup, from 2010-2014, which merged with Apigee and was acquired by Google after a successful IPO. InsightsOne helped make business and consumer interactions both relevant and profitable through cloud-based and on-premise predictive analytics and big-data solutions for health care, retail and financial services. Prior to Apigee, he was VPt of Engineering for Data Systems at Yahoo!, where he built and managed Yahoo!’s data platform from 2004 to 2009. He oversaw systems that analyzed data from 500 million consumers, and which remains one of the largest-scale systems in the world, and affect nearly all of Yahoo!’s revenue streams in addition to substantially increasing monetization and consumer engagement. Before joining Yahoo!, Hasan founded the startup DB Wizards, providing performance accelerators for ERP applications, was an architect at database software provider Informix and a researcher at HP Labs and IBM Almaden.
Waqar received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University and a BS in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He has published over 20 papers and is a recipient of the ACM SIGMOD Test of Time Award.