Randy Betancourt’s professional career has been in and around data analysis.   His journey began by managing a technical support group supporting over 2,000 technical research analysts and scientists from the US Environmental Protection Agency at one of the largest mainframe complexes run by the federal government.   He moved to Duke University,   working for the administration, to analyze staff resource utilization and costs.   There,   he was introduced to the politics of data access as the medical school had most of the data and compute resources.

He spent the majority of his career at SAS Institute Inc.,   in numerous roles,   starting in marketing and later moving into field enablement and later product management.   He subsequently developed the role for Office of the CTO consultant.

Randy traveled the globe meeting with IT and business leaders discussing the impact of data analysis to drive their business.   At the same time,   he talked to end users,   wanting to hear their perspective.   Together,   these experiences shaped his understanding for the trade-offs businesses make allocating scarce resources to collect data,   analyze,   build,   and deploy models.

More recently,   he has worked as independent consultant for firms including The International Institute of Analytics,   Microsoft’s SQL Server Group and Accenture’s Applied Intelligence Platform.

He can be contacted at tr dot betancourt at comcast dot net.

Sarah Chen has 12 years of analytics experience in banking and insurance,   including personal auto pricing,   compliance,   surveillance,   and fraud analytics,   sales analytics,   credit risk modeling for business and regulatory stress testing.   She is a Fellow of both the Casualty Actuarial Society and the Society of Actuaries (FCAS,   FSA),   an actuary,   data scientist,   and innovator.

Sarah's career began with five and a half years at Verisk Analytics Personal Auto Actuarial Division building predictive models for various ISO products.   At Verisk she learned and honed core skills in data analysis and data management.

Her skills and domain expertise were broadened when she moved to KPMG,   working with leading insurers,   banks and large online platforms on diverse business and risk management problems.

From 2014 to present Sarah has been working at HSBC Bank on wholesale credit risk models.   She has experiences in PD,   LGD and EAD models in commercial real estate,   commercial and industrial,   banks,   and non-bank financial institution portfolios.   She has been active in innovations within the organization.

Over the years she has used many analytics tools including R,   SAS,   and Python.

Sarah graduated summa cum laude with B.A. in mathematics from Columbia University in 2007.   She is the founder of Magic Math Mandarin,   a school that emphasizes values and tomorrow's skills for children.

She can be contacted at sarah dot pythagoras at gmail dot com.