Neil Raden
Hired Brains Research - Founder and Principal Analyst

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Neil is the founder and Principal Analyst at Hired Brains Research, a
provider of consulting and implementation services in business intelligence, analytics and decision management. Hired Brains focuses on the needs of organizations and capabilities of technology.

He began his career as property and casualty actuary with AIG in New York before moving into predictive analytics services, software engineering, and systems integration with experience in delivering environments for decision making in fields as diverse as health care to nuclear waste management to cosmetics marketing and many others in between.

Neil is the co-author of the book, Smart (Enough) Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions, 2007, Ptentice-Hall.  He is also the author of two forthcoming books on Data Science and Decision-Making. In 1995, Neil’s first in a series of feature articles appeared in InformationWeek, followed by dozens of others in magazines and journals. In 1998, he formed Hired Brains Magazine, a high-end monthly for professional consultants. Neil’s blog appears at hiredbrains.wordpress.com. He is a regular contributor to expert sites such as LinkedIn Groups, Focus, Quora and eBizQ, as well as contributed articles to Forbes Magazine in 2012 and 2013 on Big Data. Neil was also an early Wikipedia editor and administrator in areas of technology, health care and mathematics.

Included in Top 50 of Jonny Bentwood’s Technobabble 2.0 Top Industry Analyst Tweeters.

Recently, Neil was recognized as #34 of the top 100 most influential
people in Big Data
Analytics is a broad subject area, but analytics in decision management has traditionally been a slow, artisanal process to create artifacts useful to rules engines at runtime. Those artifacts were created using techniques of data mining, predictive analysis and sometimes, optimization algorithms. But with the emergence of massively distributed processing grids, unstructured data and Hadoop, analytics has become something new - data science.

In this talk we'll discuss what the nature of data science and data scientists is, and apply some perspective on how it should and ultimately will affect your decision processes, both manual and automated.

Great strides have been made informing decisions with analytical processes. However, the challenge of analytics is communication and creating a shared understanding. It’s about focusing on high impact areas, moving forward one step at a time, being skeptical, being creative, searching for the truth.

Any company can compete on analytics.
Neil will moderate the CTO Panel:
  • Jacob Feldman, CTO Open Rules
  • Mark Proctor, Red Hat Platform Architect
  • Gil Segal, Sapiens
  • Carlos Serrano-Morales, CTO Sparkling Logic