Analytics Grand Defile

Analytics grand defile, with 70 graduate students

May 2nd, 2015

Coming to this event was such an eye opener for me. There was so much good speech and presentations that all have interesting takes on analytic aspect. The keynote speakers were Changan Zhang, analytics PhD student and head of analytics team at CTrip in Shanghai, and Danny Jin, director of analytics at Epsilon. They were well spoken and had so many interesting thoughts to share.

For the first speaker, he presented his topic remotely from Shanghai, which was seemed very cool. Such a great use of technology these day! Changan talked about the role of analytics in his company, what it had gone through and how successful it has become. He also noted that analytics is a fast paste and demanding type of work that on an average, his company work 300 hours per week just to keep up with the demand and not to get over run by the competing companies. Even though the software that they are using is free, they had done a lot of work and make good use of it to create great models to present to the bosses. CTrip is now numbers leading in online travel agency. And the workers are working nonstop to try to stay on top of the game. Such a great story!

The second presenter is also as good. He presented his piece by giving example and tips on analytics world. Everything can be analyze and monetize. And that is how company can make money from the information that they have gathered. There are so much information that without a system of sorting and analyzing, then those information would be useless.

Not to forgot about the students’ presentation. I have the pleasure to listen to the Wine presentation on how a group of students, about 5, did an analysis on which wine is better, red or white. Before showing