Michael Berthold

Data Science for the Masses

Abstract – The vision of “Data Science for the Masses” is simple: allow non-data scientists to make use of the power of data science without really understanding the machinery under the hood. While this is possible for narrow disciplines in which a nice GUI can hide complexity, it is not so simple for serious data science. First of all, it is already hard enough to make use of the wisdom of fellow data scientists who use their own favorite tools. Secondly, and still very much an open problem, is the issue of injecting feedback from casual users.

Using various open source tools I will demonstrate a number of methods to encapsulate, reuse, and deploy analytical procedures at various levels of abstraction - giving data scientists control to expose select parts of the analytics processes to user unfamiliar with the underlying tool or without the in-depth knowledge of the analytical algorithms used.

Biography – Michael Berthold is professor at Konstanz University and Co-Founder and President of KNIME.com AG. He held positions in both academia and industry most notably at CMU, UC Berkeley, Intel, and Tripos. His research focuses on descriptive data analysis often triggered by applications in the life sciences.

More recently he has been interested in massively parallel approaches for machine learning algorithms as well. He co-wrote two well known text books: Intelligent Data Analysis (together with David Hand) and, more recently, the Guide to Intelligent Data Analysis, both published with Springer Verlag. He has given invited presentations at various high caliber academic and industrial conferences and is a Fellow of the IEEE and an Honorary Professor at Obuda University, Budapest.