Top 10 Speakers to Look Out for at NODES 2020

NODES is back for 2020! For those who aren’t familiar yet, Neo4j Online Developer Expo and Summit (NODES) is the greatest online graph developer event of the year.

On this free, one-day virtual conference, more than 70 graph experts from around the world will deliver highly technical presentations to equip you with all the graph know-hows.

Here’s the top 10 featured speakers to look out for among a long lineup of more amazing speakers at NODES 2020:

1. Emil Eifrem, Founder and CEO, Neo4j

Emil Eifrem sketched what today is known as the property graph model on a flight to Mumbai in 2000. As the CEO and Co-Founder of Neo4j, and a co-author of the O’Reilly book Graph Databases, he’s devoted his professional life to building and evangelizing graph databases. Committed to sustainable open source, he guides Neo4j along a balanced path between free availability and commercial reliability.

Emil will deliver an opening keynote to kick off NODES 2020, which more often than not includes some company or product announcements.

Hear more from Emil on Twitter.

2. Alicia Frame, Lead Product Manager, Team Graph Analytics, Neo4j

Alicia is the lead product manager for data science at Neo4j (and still a data scientist at heart!). She’s excited to build tools that empower users to solve critical problems. Her background is in the life sciences, and during the course of her career she’s always worked to develop models and dashboards to help scientists and end users answer business critical questions using data and predictive models. As a product manager at Neo4j, she sees her role as democratizing state-of-the-art academic research so it can be applied by end users in a scaleable, easy to understand way.

She will present “Graph Native Learning: Introducing GraphSAGE and Model Catalogs in Neo4j” on how to build an end-to-end machine learning pipeline using graph embeddings from Neo4j’s Graph Data Science Library.

Get more from Alicia on Twitter.

3. David Meza, Sr. Data Scientist, NASA

David Meza is currently a Sr. Data Scientist for the NASA’s Office of Human Capital in D.C. He previously served as Chief Knowledge Architect at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC). During his tenure at NASA, he has worked in all aspects of the Information Technology field developing and deploying several IT systems in use at JSC.

He will present “Developing a Knowledge Graph of Your Knowledge, Skills, Abilities, Tasks and Training (KSATT)” to show you how to develop an occupation knowledge graph from open data, augment it with inferred employee attributes and use graph data science procedures to explore the dataset.

Hear more from David on Twitter.

4. Jim Webber, Chief Scientist, Neo4j

Dr. Jim Webber is Neo4j’s Chief Scientist and Visiting Professor at Newcastle University. At Neo4j, Jim works on fault-tolerant graph databases and co-wrote O’Reilly’s Graph Databases book. Jim is active in the software development and database research communities, presenting regularly around the world.

He will give you “A Humane Presentation about Graph Database Internals” for a deep dive into the insides of the Neo4j graph database.

Check out his blog and tweets for more.

5. Julie Fisher, Risk Modeling Scientist, Asurion

Julie is the subject matter expert on graph at Asurion for the fraud machine learning team, conducts Knowledge Sharing sessions on Python programming for the Risk Analysts, and has a master’s degree in Data Science from Lipscomb University.

She will demonstrate that “Not All Visualizations Are Created Equal.” Studies at MIT show that the human brain can process images that the eye sees for as little as 13 milliseconds. In this talk, she will cover how to tailor the visualization to the use case, how to make wise data choices, how to incorporate an iterative process that integrates user feedback, and what kind of in-tool functionality to focus on.

Get more from Julie on LinkedIn.

6. Keita Broadwater, Founder and Machine Learning Engineer, Peerce.ai

Dr. Broadwater is a machine learning engineer and technology executive with interest in the application of graph technologies. He is currently writing a book on Graph Neural Networks, to be published in spring 2021.

He will present “Network Like an Egghead: Analytics and Visualization on LinkedIn,” including advanced ways to visualize and analyze your network, given your own network data, using LinkedIn.

Hear more from Dr. Broadwater on Twitter.

7. Luanne Misquitta, VP of Engineering, GraphAware

Luanne Misquitta is VP of Engineering at GraphAware, the World’s #1 Neo4j solutions and consultancy and has been (happily) working with Neo4j for over 10 years. She was a core committer to Neo4j OGM and SDN 4, and has spoken at GraphConnect in Europe and the U.S. She currently enjoys consulting at GraphAware’s key clients on graph modeling, Cypher, best practices and the application of graphs in various domains.

She will deliver “Malt Aware: Discovering What to Drink with Neo4j,” demonstrating how to produce good starting-point recommendations for whisky using Cypher that are of higher quality than those we see at our favourite online stores.

Get more from Luanne on Twitter.

8. Martin Maiers, VP of Innovation, Be The Match

Martin Maiers is Vice President of Innovation at Be The Match where he has worked for 24 years. He leads an R&D translation program focused on applying new tools for HLA matching and algorithm development to improve cell and gene therapies. With his team he has developed a number of tools and methods for searching large donor registries with missing or partial information to identify suitable hematopoietic stem cell donors.

“We Save Lives! Using Neo4j to Find a Bone Marrow Donor.” This presentation will cover how Martin’s organization uses Neo4j to analyze tens of millions of volunteer donors where there might only be one match for a patient in need of transplant.

Hear more from Martin on Twitter.

9. Polley Wong, CEO, VIUSPACE

Polley Wong is a serial entrepreneur. She’s the CEO of design technology and research company VIUSPACE and co-founded the Interior and Architecture design firm We Create Group with Interior Designer Briana Earl. She’s a strong advocate for gender equality in the workplace and sponsors various STEM-related inclusion and diversity initiatives.

She will tell a story from 2019 about “The Graph Database Workshop That Changed an Industry.”

Get more from Polly on Twitter.

10. Robert Kubis, Cloud Developer Advocate, Google

Robert Kubis is a Developer Advocate for Google Cloud based in Colorado, U.S. He specializes in container, storage and scalable technologies. Robert is a frequent speaker and keynote speaker on technology and best practices in cloud application development. Before joining Google, he collected over 10 years of experience in software development and architecture, driving multiple full-stack application projects

Rober will present, along with David Allen, “Developing Applications with Neo4j AuraDB on Google Cloud.”

Get more from Robert on LinkedIn.