Michael Dessauer has been a data scientist in The Dow Chemical Company's Advanced Analytics team since 2010. In that time, he has partnered with many Dow global businesses and functions to develop statistical and machine learning models to improve market insight and increase margins. Michael leads the text analytics project team that has created custom solutions for consumer sentiment, new market identification, and contract analysis.

Boris serves the Application Development & Delivery role. He is a leading expert in business intelligence (BI) — a set of processes, methodologies, and technologies used to transform raw data into meaningful, useful, and action-oriented enterprise information. Boris delivers strategic guidance, helping enterprises define BI strategies, governance, and architectures and identify vendors and technologies that help them put information to use in business processes and end user experiences.

Boris' current research focuses on the practical and actionable best practices for building BI infrastructure and applications, such as BI business cases, architectural options, organizational structures, and vendor selection. Boris continues to explore emerging trends in next-generation BI, such as agile BI architecture and development approaches, in-memory analytics, advanced data visualization, convergence of structured data and unstructured content analytics, process-driven and operational BI, and many others.

Dr. Andrew Fast leads the research and development of advanced data mining algorithms at Elder Research, the nation's leading data mining consultancy. ERI was founded in 1995 and has offices in Charlottesville VA and Washington DC,(www.elderresearch.com). ERI focuses on Federal, commercial, investment, and security applications of advanced analytics, including stock selection, image recognition, biometrics, process optimization, cross-selling, drug efficacy, credit scoring, risk management, and fraud detection.

Dr. Fast graduated Magna Cum Laude from Bethel University and earned Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. There, his research focused on causal data mining and mining complex relational data such as social networks. At ERI, Andrew leads the development of new tools and algorithms for data and text mining for applications of capabilities assessment, fraud detection, and national security.

Dr. Fast has published on an array of applications including detecting securities fraud using the social network among brokers, and understanding the structure of criminal and violent groups. Other publications cover modeling peer-to-peer music file sharing networks, understanding how collective classification works, and predicting playoff success of NFL head coaches (work featured on ESPN.com). With John Elder and other co-authors, Andrew has written a book on Practical Text Mining that was awarded the prose Award for Computing and Information Science in 2012.

Frederick holds a bachelor and a master degree in actuarial science from Laval University. Since 2004, he is working for the Co-operators General Insurance Company, where he is currently Senior manager - Research and Innovation.

Since 2009, he is also a regular lecturer at Laval University, teaching principally predictive modeling. In 2014, he founded Actulab.ca, a not-for-profit organism with the mission to facilitate collaborations between academics and practitioners by offering case-competitions to Canadian students.

Justin Kauhl, is a computational linguistics expert for Tata Consulting Services and a full-time contractor with Dow Advanced Analytics. Justin has created custom text collection, organization, and natural language processing tools which Dow implements in its text analytics projects.

Steven J. Ramirez is the chief executive officer of Berkeley, Calif.-based Beyond the Arc, Inc., a firm recognized as a leader in helping companies transform their customer experiences by leveraging advanced analytics.

In addition to developing and executing the vision for Beyond the Arc, Ramirez leads teams of data and strategy consultants committed to client success. They analyze customer and social media data, combined with text analysis, to drive customer growth, improve customer retention, understand service breaks and build stronger customer loyalty.

Prior to leading Beyond the Arc, Ramirez served as an executive with Time Warner, where he was responsible for creating and successfully implementing marketing and corporate development strategies.

Ramirez earned a bachelor's degree and master's in Business Administration from the University of California at Berkeley. He as also created and taught courses in business management for UC Berkeley and been a guest speaker at the university's Haas School of Business.