Thursday, February 15: Join us for a trio of interesting talks on writing good R code, ensemble modeling in sports analytics & hedge funds, and extending R to Keras. Hosted by IBM, a variety of food and beverage options will be generously provided, so bring your appetite! Doors open at 5:30 and presentations begin at 6, each running about 20 minutes. There will be time for networking and general discussion afterwards.

Peter Hurford is a data engineer with DataRobot. He previously has worked within the advertising and financial technology space. He is a frequent open source developer in R and Python. You can see his work at https://github.com/peterhurford

Igor is on the customer facing data science team within DataRobot tasked with making customers successful. Broadly he has interests in the application of machine learning within varied domains of human health and healthcare. Outside of work, he won't turn down an opportunity to hear new ideas within basketball analytics or discuss the latest poor decision Bulls general management is making. You can collaborate with him at https://github.com/iveksl2

https://keras.rstudio.com/ Rajiv Shah is a data scientist with DataRobot and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has previously worked as a data scientist for State Farm and Caterpillar. He is an active member of the data science community in Chicago and helps organize the Tensorflow Deep Learning meet up. He has a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. You can find him on twitter at rajcs4 or his home page: http://RajivShah.com