Szilard Pafka, PhD
Chief Scientist, Epoch (USA)

Szilard studied Physics in the 90s and obtained a PhD by using statistical methods to analyze the risk of financial portfolios. He worked in finance, then in 2006 he moved to become the Chief Scientist of a tech company in Santa Monica, California doing everything data (analysis, modeling, data visualization, machine learning, data infrastructure etc). He was the founder/organizer of several meetups in the Los Angeles area (R, data science etc) and the data science community website datascience.la for more than a decade until he relocated to Texas in 2021. He is the author of a well-known machine learning benchmark on github (1000+ stars), a frequent speaker at conferences (keynote/invited at KDD, R-finance, Crunch, eRum and contributed at useR!, PAW, EARL, H2O World, Data Science Pop-up, Dataworks Summit etc.), and he has developed and taught graduate data science and machine learning courses as a visiting professor at two universities (UCLA in California and CEU in Europe).

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/szilard
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DataScienceLA
Github: https://github.com/szilard