Paul Raff (Analysis and Experimentation at Microsoft) - CAPP Workshop

Fitting Square Pegs in Round Holes with Data: a Tutorial on Data Design and Effective Manipulation

Please join us for a workshop with Paul Raff, Principal Data Scientist Lead at Microsoft's Analysis and Experimentation team. The workshop will begin with Mr. Raff describing how the first rude awakening data scientists receive as they move from school to industry is the fact that the data they desire to solve problems either doesn’t exist, or it exists in various places intended for different purposes. The workshop will ask: how does a data scientist be effective when the core pieces of his/her work are so scattered?

The discussion will focus on two separate but related strategies to deal with the data standardization problem: the data pipeline architecture and the data view architecture. Mr. Raff will discuss and work through examples of these in action, and show how this infrastructure is successfully created and maintained within Microsoft.

Mr. Raff joined Microsoft from Amazon in 2012 when the team was the Bing experimentation group, and since then the team has expanded the analysis and experimentation success from Bing to the rest of Microsoft. He also focuses on building tools that are effective at helping people better digest and understand new sources of data. Raff has previously worked at Amazon, the Bechtel Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory, and the NSA. He received his PhD in Mathematics from Rutgers University, his MS in Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon and his BS in Mathematics and Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon.