About AlphaZetta Academy

Eugene is Managing Partner of AlphaZetta Academy and a leader in the analytics field in Australia, with 20 years’ commercial data science experience. He is the head of the Sydney Data Science group (3,000+ members), the Sydney Users of R Forum (1,900+ members), and Datapreneurs (400+ members). He is regularly invited to be a conference presenter, consultant and advisor, and appears in print and on television to discuss data science and analytics. Eugene also applies data science in an entrepreneurial setting, to financial trading and online startups, and is the creator of ggraptR, an interactive visualisation package in R.

He is a Director at Presciient, providing analytics capability, development services including team selection, training, and executive coaching for team owners and sponsors. They also provide strategic advisory, communications and specialised advanced data analysis.

Stephen Brobst is the Chief Technology Officer for Teradata Corporation. Stephen performed his graduate work in Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where his Masters and PhD research focused on high-performance parallel processing. He also completed an MBA with joint course and thesis work at the Harvard Business School and the MIT Sloan School of Management. Stephen is a TDWI Fellow and has been on the faculty of The Data Warehousing Institute since 1996. During Barack Obama’s first term he was also appointed to the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) in the working group on Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD). In 2014 he was ranked by ExecRank as the #4 CTO in the United States (behind the CTOs from Amazon.com, Tesla Motors, and Intel) out of a pool of 10,000+ CTOs.

Jeffrey Aven is a big data, open source software, and cloud computing consultant, author and has extensive experience as a technical instructor. He has taught courses on Hadoop and HBase for Cloudera (awarded Cloudera Hadoop Instructor of the Year for APAC in 2013) and courses on Apache Kafka for Confluent in addition to delivering his own courses.

Jeffrey is also the author of several Big Data related books on Hadoop and Apache Spark.

In addition to his credentials as an instructor and author, Jeff has over thirty years of industry experience and has been involved in key roles with several major big data and cloud implementations over the last several years.

Michelle is an authority on presenting persuasively in business. She is a best-selling, internationally published author on persuasive presenting in business and has been nominated 9 times for the Educator Award for Excellence for her facilitation of the Persuasive Presentation Skills Masterclass.
Michelle is one of approx. 40 female Certified Speaking Professionals (CSPs) in Australia, the highest designation for speakers in the world. With extensive experience coaching executives for high-stake presentations and multi-million dollar pitches and tenders, Michelle also coaches high profile celebrities and international speakers for the stage.
Michelle has facilitated her Persuasive Presentation Skills Masterclass over 820 times with over 10,000 people.

Alexander has been in the analytics space for more than 15 years, helping customers to execute leadership in context of identifying and leveraging business value in their data. He believes in a fail fast culture, breaking with established processes and that exploring new paths is important to accelerate data driven business models.

He adds a creative mind to AlphaZetta with a wealth of experience from working with multinational enterprises as well as intercultural teams. He has a wealth of international experience and is recognized for sharing expertise among like-minded people in the global community.

Tristan Blakers is a fintech professional with 15 years experience designing systems for global financial institutions. He currently consults for several blockchain startups, specialising in the tokenisation, custody, and exchange of real-world assets. Tristan gave expert advice to academic researchers at the CMCRC’s Digital Currency Research Centre, and built their crypto-data acquisition platform. He also ran a cryptocurrency brokerage and custody service targeting high net-worth individuals and investment funds seeking exposure to this emerging asset class.

With over 10 years working as a data scientist specialising in statistical modelling, Katrina’s passion for human transformation led her into her own thought leadership practice particularly as a trainer, speaker, author and mentor.

By merging her post-graduate degrees in both psychology and statistics, her people development programs offer simplified approaches to obtaining genius level EQ, resilience, self-awareness, dynamite communication skills and presentation skills for maximum impact and influence.

When data scientists get people and get themselves, they get the best out of their data; and Katrina’s delivery ensures this.

Tony believes that analytic innovation and creativity come from experts directly collaborating with clients on their projects. He joins AlphaZetta with a mission, to create a better way for independent experts to work directly with clients, lowering the costs and opening access to high quality analytics talent to a wider audience.

He brings 20 years of deep practical experience globally. He has held senior positions with clients and large consulting firms. He has won several awards for innovation in analytics including as a Finalist for Australia’s Young Business Person of the Year Awards.

Daniel has consulted, driven business development and delivered for 50+ Telcos, Cable operators, video OTT players and Oil & Gas companies in Latin America. Prior to joining AlphaZetta, Daniel held senior roles at NCR, Telefonica, cVidya /Amdocs, Grey Juice Lab UK and Teradata.

Daniel currently manages AlphaZetta LATAM chapter. He has lectured for 20+ companies over the last 12 years. Current teaching experience includes customers like Accenture / Movistar / Universidad Di Tella / Universidad de Buenos Aires.

Frances has been helping clients to tackle data challenges since 2007. While working as a consultant, Frances frequently has opportunities to drive and to apply data analytics across multiple industries and business domains in large and small organisations. Her rich mix of technical and business experience, paired up with passion and curiosity create a chemistry which turns data to a powerful tool.

Frances is an experienced tutor, having earned her early wages tutoring younger students on math and other science subjects until after university. More recently she has been presenting topics around data analytics in various business meetings, conferences and MeetUps, as well as giving guest lectures on the topic of Data Driven Decision Making in Copenhagen Business School. 

With a background in economics and finance, Theo has applied statistical and machine learning techniques to solve business problems across different domains: banking, fraud detection, digital advertising, product analytics, customer acquisition, financial trading and portfolio optimisation.

Theo is an expert in all phases of the data science process, from business understanding, data acquisition, modelling through to deployment. He has worked for Atlassian using open source technology including R and Python, cloud platforms and services, through to enterprise-level analytics such as SAS at Westpac Bank.

A trained data expert with 10 years’ experience at turning data into insights to solve complex problems across various roles in business and government. Tom is an analytical and conceptually minded problem solver with a passion for business improvement. He offers a broad skillset with experience in client relations, collaborative leadership and strategic thinking.
Tom has used his background in economics and mathematics in building a data warehousing and business intelligence technology stack, economic costing of policy and commodity forecasting. He has also tutored mathematics and economics and taught courses on python.

Marek is an experienced data scientist and trainer with strong business outcome focus. Previously, Marek worked for more than 10 years for Schlumberger Oilfield Services around the world in several technical, engineering and training positions (including 3 years as a trainer of technical as well as corporate culture related content in Russia and UAE), and later with the Digital Transformation Team.

Marek began his a Data Analytics education at the Texas A&M University Mays Business School in Houston. Since that time, he has developed a strong acumen for QHSE (Quality, Health, Safety and Environment) related analytics and data science. Marek also runs his own consulting company in Austria, specialising in QHSE analytics and how to decrease risk and increase business outcomes.

Carles is a Senior Data Scientist and teacher of analytics. He specialises in end-to-end rapid prototyping of analytics projects in the energy industry. He is well versed with lean start-up methodologies, minimum viable product (MVP), open source software and cloud environments.

Carles is also an experienced teacher of analytics to business leaders. He has taught at clients like the cement multinational CEMEX about the importance of data collection and procedures to systematically improve it. Additionally he teaches fundamentals of A/B testing, fleet performance & life data analysis, weibull analysis, and six sigma for beginners. Carles is also part of the BarcelonaR group (100+ members) where he regularly talks about Introduction to R, principles of reproducibility and shiny apps.