Meeting/Event Information

We will be joined by Mike Pickart (Informatica), David Kowalski (MIDAS Advisory Services), and Jacob Rozran (adjunct statistics professor at Villanova)

The presentations -

1) Navigating Generative AI: Foundational Strategies for Effective Data Management, Governance and Cataloging 

Mike Pickart is a dynamic technology leader with over 20 years of of experience in data management. Currently serving as the Director of Solution Architecture at Informatica, Mike leads a team that partners with customers from various industries to architect innovative data-driven solutions that address diverse business objectives, leveraging the capabilities of Informatica's data management platform spanning master data management, data governance and privacy, data integration, and application integration. Additionally, Mike oversees Informatica's North American Associate Consulting Program, where he works with early-stage professionals in effective data management, architecture, and sales engineering best practices.

Prior to his current role, Mike worked at Linedata, where he worked in the fintech space with alternative asset and hedge fund customers, and at Epic, where he contributed to successful healthcare software implementations. Mike is now based in South Jersey, and as an alumnus of University of Pennsylvania enjoys spending time in Philadelphia and introducing his children to the city.

2) There’s no one right way to define your Data Governance Guardrails, but David Kowalski has developed a framework for establishing a coherent, integrated approach to building out a set of Guardrail documents that work as a whole…documents that reinforce one another with common themes that focus on achieving what he calls "Holistic Data Governance™." This is an approach to Data Governance that respects the localized needs of the individual parts of your organization while orchestrating them into a meaningful whole that helps deliver the data that your organization needs at all levels in order to make meaningful decisions about how to succeed in your particular industry. This presentation will give an overview of this approach along with some ways that you can find out more about the details.

David Kowalski, Ph.D., has spent his entire professional life showing organizations how best to manage and govern their data. David is currently President of MIDAS Advisory Services, a data management executive advisory firm based in Princeton, NJ. He has worked with Data Management executives at large and mid-sized corporations around the world to assess their Data Management practices and help devise strategies and policies to improve their efficiency, effectiveness, and reliability while mitigating risk exposure. An industry thought leader, David appears regularly at conferences across the country and is a very active contributing member of the Enterprise Data Management Council. He is the author of "Holistic Data Governance," a series of books on the integration of Data Governance throughout an organization.

3) Jacob Rozran loves all things data.  He is an adjunct statistics professor at Villanova, and will be discussing the pitfalls of deceiving data visualizations and presentations -- a topic that was very well received last month at a Philly Data Science meetup.    Data is used and abused often. As Mark Twain said, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." This presentation will go over, satirically, how to mislead using data. It will get into improper data visualization, suspicious predictions, and a conversation on big data and surveillance.

Jake Rozran is an Adjunct Professor at Villanova, teaching undergraduates how to program, wrangle data, visualize data, and analyze data in R, and the owner and principal data scientist of the data consulting firm, RLE Analytics. Passionate about data science and statistics for the last 10+ years, he holds his masters of applied statistics from Villanova and his undergraduate degree from Drexel. Outside of data, he lives with his wife and two children in Havertown, PA.