Chicago Data Night: Ari Kaplan (Databricks)

Please join us for our monthly Chicago Data Night, cohosted by ChiData and DSI. Practitioners, academics, and aficionados within the Chicago area are all invited to be part of a community at the intersection of industry and academia, brought together by a mutual interest in data. Each month, guest speakers will cover a specific data-related topic.

Hors d’oeuvres and drinks will be provided. Admission is free, and we strongly encourage filling out an RSVP here.

Abstract: Hear first-hand about the modern data stack. Businesses are adopting lakehouse architectures and building GenAI LLMs for their businesses. Having helped lead the adoption of data science throughout baseball, including creating the Chicago Cubs analytics department, Ari will lead a lively discussion on the most up-to-date business trends for building data & AI at scale and velocity, and how businesses are now training their own proprietary LLMs on their own data with transparency, governance, and explainability.

Agenda
4:00pm:   Doors Open
5:00pm:   Welcome Remarks
5:10pm:    Guest Speaker
6:00pm:   Q&A
6:15pm:    Reception

Meeting Location
The Auditorium at 1871
Merchandise Mart, #1212
222 W Merchandise Mart Plaza
Chicago, IL 60654

Ari Kaplan: Ari is Databrick’s Global Head of Evangelism, and a leading influencer in AI, databases, and sports analytics. “The Real Moneyball guy”, the popular movie was partly based on Ari’s analytical and scouting experiences innovating Major League Baseball, and later creating the Cubs, Dodgers, and Orioles analytics departments. He is President of the Independent Investigation into the Fate of Raoul Wallenberg, Sweden’s humanitarian hero, leveraging data analytics to find missing POWs. His background in data includes having been President of the worldwide Oracle users group (22,000 members) when Oracle acquired MySQL, Java, and Peoplesoft. He traveled the world with McLaren Formula 1, assisting the racing strategy team to bring AI models to production.