Talks
Talks given at conferences, symposiums, lectures.
- set a Data Strategy
- building Decision Systems
- achieve Data Adoption
dbt Singapore meetup: Using dbt for accounting and investment reporting
I’ve always believed that there is still a lot of value in tackling bread and butter reporting using the modern stack of data tools. One of the most valuable and important reporting workflows in any business isn’t in the marketing, product, or engineering teams - it’s in the finance team.
Reporting on the financial performance and health of companies and investments is usually done by large teams exerting a large amount of elbow grease. By leveraging dbt in our firm’s accounting and investment reporting, we were able to deliver both accounting and investment reporting on a daily basis and in an automated fashion.
The presentation was intended to give an overview of what dbt users who are tackling similar challenges could face and what worked best for us in overcoming those challenges.
We also wrote about this talk on the Titanium Birch blog.
Data analytics in emerging markets
I was invited by the Civil Service Commission of the Philippines to provide a short talk on data analytics in emerging markets.
I wanted to provide an organization with a rough blueprint to building a sustainable data practice in an emerging market context, including to:
The slides are here:
Harnessing the Power of Data
Prepared and presented this talk along with the data team at First Circle at Philippine Startup Week 2020. Focused on the practical aspects of actually creating a data function within a startup, from Data Strategy, to Data Engineering, and Data Analytics. We intentionally skipped Data Science.
Here are the slides for reference:
Data Science for Operational Impact
Data science for operational impact is quite an interesting field of study that has more intersections with social sciences and requires more organizational savvy.
Much of the data science discourse at the time was geared towards what I call Product Data Science, where the goal was to build highly scalable machine learning systems that solve a general problem (think Uber’s surge algorithm). However, I think an equally interesting area of data science is what I’d call Operational Data Science, where there is significantly more iteration, working with domain experts (local marketers, country managers), to solve problems with “human-in-the-loop”.
Thinking about data science this way has enabled me to overcome many adoption barriers in my past work.
I presented this at SGInnovate, a data science incubator bootcamp in Singapore, while I was still at Uber.
Exploring the world of Philippine online news
The Databeers Manila crowd at the Google Philippines office.
Last week, I had the chance to speak at Databeers Manila, which is a data science event infused with the power of good ol' beer. The event was held in the Google Philippines office, and beer was care of Katipunan Craft Ales.
On Data Visualization Design
Last year, I was invited to speak at World Information Architecture Day 2016 in Manila, held at A-Space, Makati. I covered an introduction to data use cases, and how to think about designing data visualizations, and why I think designing the right ways for people to consume insights from data is just as important than our ability to process or analyze them.
The video is up for people to watch. Please let me know your thoughts at the comments section.
If you’d like to view the slides more clearly, I’ve uploaded them to slideshare:
Career Talk for students at De La Salle University
I gave this talk to a bunch of De La Salle University students about how university helped me in my role at Uber.