2022 DATA Forum: Breaking the Wall – Challenges in Digital Transformation

Mico Yuk
Chief Data Evangelist, Count | Host, Analytics on Fire

Mico Yuk is the Chief Data Evangelist at Count.co, Co-founder of  BI Brainz, Host of the Analytics on Fire Podcast, and the mastermind behind the BI/Analytics Data Storytelling Framework (BIDS), where she has trained thousands globally on how to strategically use the power of data visualization to enhance the decision-making process. Her proprietary methodology fuses the art of data storytelling and visualization to drive users to take action. Mico's ability to help companies gain ROI from their business intelligence investments has been sought out by Fortune 500 companies such as Shell, FedEx, Nestle, Qatargas, Ericsson, Procter & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark, and more. Rated as the #7 most influential entrepreneur in BI, she has also authored the “Data Visualization for Dummies” (Wiley 2014) book.

Brian Trauman
Chief Data Officer, KPMG Tax

Brian is KPMG's first Chief Data Officer (CDO) for Tax, and is responsible for leveraging available data to drive additional value for KPMG's clients.  Brian is also a Senior Lead Tax Partner, which involves working empathetically with clients to bring the best resources to meet their needs and developing other professionals to serve clients similarly.  

Immediately prior to taking the CDO role, Brian was the U.S. National Transfer Pricing Leader for KPMG's Economic and Valuation Services (EVS) practice and the National Leader for KPMG's Transfer Pricing Dispute Resolution practice.  Brian has also served as the Global Leader of the Transfer Pricing Dispute Resolution network and as the Leader for EVS's New York practice.

A significant part of Brian's practice has been helping clients manage and resolve disputes and respond to the challenges that come with transfer pricing controversies, whether domestic or international.

Cansu Canca
Ethics Lead, Institute for Experimental AI

Cansu is a philosopher and the Founder & Director of AI Ethics Lab, where she leads teams of computer scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars to provide ethics analysis and guidance to researchers and practitioners. She is also the Ethics Lead and Research Associate Professor at the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University, co-leading their Responsible AI practice. Cansu serves as an AI Ethics and Governance Expert consultant to the United Nations, working with UNICRI Centre for AI & Robotics and the INTERPOL in building a “Toolkit for Responsible AI Innovation in Law Enforcement”. Cansu has a Ph.D. in philosophy specializing in applied ethics. She primarily works on ethics of technology, having previously worked on ethics and health.

Chris Goodman
Digital Platform Advisor, CUDigital

Chris Goodman has worked in the credit union system for more than 23 years, most recently as CIO at Gulf & Fraser in Vancouver. Chris transitioned from that role in 2021 to work more broadly as an advisor, both to financial institutions and to UST Global where is actively involved in ecosystem and digital transformation work in financial services globally. Chris understands what digital transformation means for medium sized financial institutions and has been a vocal proponent of change. Chris speaks frequently at industry events, and is also the author of CUPlatform, a newsletter dedicated to the future of cooperative finance, digital transformation, and sustainability.

Francisco Rius
Head of Data Science, Minecraft (Microsoft)

Head of Data Science and Data Engineering teams for Mojang studios. Minecraft is the world's best-selling video game, with more than 200 million copies sold, operating on dozens of platform end points and requiring intelligent solutions to deliver data-driven insights.

His team is responsible for the delivery of insights across multiple data science & analytics tracks, including business analytics, game/product analytics, quality analysis, and other data science tracks & disciplines. Our approach to data insights is centered on internal stakeholder relationships and the creation of specialized teams with strong subject matter expertise in different areas.

Mike Benson
Director of Business Intelligence, Boston Celtics

Mike Benson is in his fourth season with the Boston Celtics and is currently the Director of Business Intelligence. The business intelligence team is responsible for analyzing and operationalizing data from most aspects of the Celtics business. Prior to his time with the Celtics, Mike worked with data at EY in their forensic technology practice and studied sport management & information management and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Jon Hay
Vice Pres. of Data, Analytics, & Intelligence, Boston Red Sox

Jon Hay is the Senior Vice President of Data, Intelligence, and Analytics for the Boston Red Sox, overseeing all business analytics and strategy efforts as well as data, reporting, and CRM for the organization. He joined the Red Sox in 2013 as a baseball analytics intern before transitioning to the business side in 2015. He received his MBA with Honors from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in Economics from Harvard College. Prior to joining the Red Sox, Jon was a fixed income derivatives trader at Morgan Stanley in New York.

Josh Pohlkamp-Hartt
Data Scientist, Boston Bruins

Josh is the data scientist with the NHL's Boston Bruins. He has been with the team for the last 4 seasons. He obtained a PhD in Statistics from Queen's University in Canada and previously worked at Apple Maps. In his role with the Bruins, Josh provides statistical support on all manner of hockey related decisions from team strategy to draft selections.

Patrick McQuillan
Head of Data Governance & Operational Effectiveness, Wayfair

Mr. McQuillan is an executive, data scientist, economist, and lecturer. He orchestrates end-to-end data management and performance measurement across multiple interconnected business units, and translates findings into actionable vision plans for C-suite leadership. He has spent the majority of his career providing data-driven consulting services on matters of data architecture and analytics, financial analysis, media and advertising, antitrust, strategic repositioning, and market entry. His clients have spanned the US, EU, and Middle East, and include the majority of Fortune 10 companies. Mr. McQuillan is a sought-after expert in the areas of data governance, business intelligence and data visualization, data warehousing and cloud management, data analytics, data-driven operations optimization and CX strategy, and artificial intelligence. He has also lectured on these topics at Northeastern University, Boston University, and the University of Oxford

Sam Bishop
Director of Analytics, Tripadvisor

As Head of Accommodations and Auction Analytics at Tripadvisor, Sam's teams are responsible for helping stakeholders leverage behavioral, transactional, supply-side, and third-party data to answer business questions. As a change agent for analytics, Sam collaborates with partners across the business, including operations, product, engineering, data engineering, and data science, to help increase the organization's data leverage.

Most recently, Sam led the Data function at edX, an online education provider, where her multidisciplinary teams spanned data engineering, analytics engineering, and data science/analytics.

Dr. Sandy Pentland
Director, MIT Connection Science

Professor Alex ‘Sandy' Pentland directs MIT Connection Science, an MIT-wide initiative, and previously helped create and direct the MIT Media Lab and the Media Lab Asia in India. He is one of the most-cited computational scientists in the world, and Forbes declared him one of the “7 most powerful data scientists in the world” along with Google founders and the Chief Technical Officer of the United States.

He is on the Board of the UN Foundations' Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, co-led the World Economic Forum discussion in Davos that led to the EU privacy regulation GDPR, and was central in forging the transparency and accountability mechanisms in the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. He has received numerous awards and prizes such as the McKinsey Award from Harvard Business Review, the 40th Anniversary of the Internet from DARPA, and the Brandeis Award for work in privacy. Recent invited keynotes include annual meetings of OECD, G20, World Bank, and JP Morgan.

Sarah Evangeline Norman
Sales & Data Leader, TikTok

Sarah is a data storyteller. She is now a sales and data leader at TikTok. Previously, she spent 6 years at Google working with Fortune 50 companies. She is also a Senior Fellow at Wharton, focusing on their customer analytics program. Separately from her tech and data work, she is heavily involved in politics. She was Senior Advisor to Digital during the Kamala Harris 2020 campaign and is often seen on Fox News representing liberal points of view.

Tom Davenport
Distinguished Professor of IT and Management, Babson College

Besides his current role at Babson College, Tom Davenport is also a Visiting Professor at Oxford Business School, a Fellow of the MIT Digital Economy Initiative, and Senior Advisor to Deloitte's AI practice. He has published 23 books and over 300 articles for Harvard Business Review and many other publications. He has been named one of the world's Top 25 Consultants, one of the top 3 business/technology analysts, one of the 100 most influential people in the IT industry, and one of the top fifty business school professors in the world. He's worked with many of the world's leading companies on data, analytics, and AI strategies, organizational structures, and deployment processes.

Vin Vashishta
Founder, V-Squared

Vin prepares companies to profit from AI. He has built and advised AI strategies at some of the largest companies in the world. Vin teaches clients to take AI strategy from plan to profitability, creating growth in challenging times. Vin founded V-Squared 10 years ago and has grown it to be a leader in the AI strategy consulting and data science training industries.