Mauricio Vacas

With years of experience working with cloud computing and distributed data architectures, Mauricio is passionate about creating value with technology. He is an industry-recognized leader in technical architecture for cloud-hosted data solutions.

Mauricio is a Senior Data Engineer at Silicon Valley Data Science. He has experience working with distributed storage and processing systems such as Hadoop, Spark, Cassandra and related tools in the ecosystem; application and web services development in Spring Java and Python; and designed and built cloud technical architectures in AWS and NTT. Mauricio has deployed models into production built using Spark, R, Impala, Hive, and other tools and works to bridge the gap between model development and deployment. Prior to joining SVDS, Mauricio was a technical architecture manager working in Accenture’s R&D group and Big Data practice. He managed a team of data scientists and engineers to build a web-scale recommender and network analytics streaming services on cloud infrastructure and presented the work at Strata and DataStax NYC* conferences. He was also a main developer in Accenture’s Cloud Platform which is used in over 30 client solutions and over 1600 managed servers. He has experience working with clients in the retail, healthcare, and banking industries.

Mauricio holds a Masters of Science in Computer Engineering from the University of Florida.

Bryan Walker

With a diverse background in technology strategy and solution architecture, Bryan is passionate about helping clients solve their biggest technology problems. He brings experience from several different industries to help clients develop strategies for how to best utilize their data and build a strong competitive advantage.

Bryan brings together a unique background of technology strategy and solution architecture, spaces where he has advised multiple clients in many different industries. Prior to joining SVDS, Bryan was the operations lead for Accenture’s Digital Customer initiative within Accenture Technology Labs. In this role, he developed strategies and advised clients on how to leverage big data architectures and real-time analytics technologies in order to develop more personalized and engaging experiences for retail customers. Prior to working on the Digital Customer initiative, Bryan helped to lead the build-out for some of Accenture’s initial assets for analyzing unstructured text data. He was also one of Accenture’s initial resources in cloud computing, where he designed the new technical architecture for a global energy client’s fuel retail division and authored a cloud and virtualization migration strategy for a large state university.

Throughout his experiences, Bryan has earned a patent in cloud computing technology and has built skills around: AWS, Python, Hadoop, Cassandra, and Tableau.

Brian holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois.

Jonathan Whitmore

Following a postdoctoral position in astrophysics, Jonathan is a sought after speaker on computing and astronomy. He is excited by the application of machine learning and statistical techniques to industry problems and has developed novel data analysis techniques.

Jonathan has a diverse range of interests and is excited by the challenges and possibilities in the field of data science and engineering. He comes to SVDS after participating in the Insight Data Science Fellowship to prepare for transitioning from academic research into the tech industry. His Insight project was an art auction pricing prediction analysis. Before Insight, Dr. Whitmore completed an astrophysics postdoc at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia, where his research focused on trying to determine whether the physical constants of the universe have changed over cosmological times. This research sent him to world-class observatories to observe on the largest optical telescopes in existence. Further, he has a long-standing commitment to the public understanding of science and technology, most notably by his co-starring in the 3D IMAX film “Hidden Universe” which is currently playing in theatres around the world.

Jonathan received his PhD in physics from the University of California in San Diego, and graduated with a Bachelor of Science from Vanderbilt with a triple major in physics, philosophy, and mathematics.

Richard Williamson

Richard has been at the cutting edge of big data since its inception, leading multiple efforts to build multi-petabyte Hadoop platforms, maximizing business value by combining data science with big data. He has extensive experience creating advanced analytic systems using data warehousing and data mining technologies.

Richard is an expert in big data architecture, platform deployment, and large-scale data science. Prior to joining SVDS, he led development of a multi-petabyte Hadoop platform at WalmartLabs. The platform included deployment of two separate Impala data warehouses that hosted production and ad-hoc workloads serving hundreds of billions of rows of log and transactional data. The warehouses also included HBase instances setup with active-active replication in two separate data centers serving millions of operations per second on near real-time data feeds from flume. Prior to WalmartLabs, Richard launched the first Hadoop system at Walmart Stores, spanning from idea to multi-petabyte production system starting in 2009. This included proposal to build Hadoop as a complement to the data warehouse and data mining platform then rapidly moving from proof of concept to full secure production deployment enabling customers to perform analysis that could not be done in existing systems.

He has also built several advanced analytics applications including: distributed optimization engine for workforce scheduling; forecasting systems using over ten years of history to predict daily, weekly and monthly sales; transportation route scheduling systems; supply chain optimization systems; price modeling systems; and various data mining efforts.

Richard holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science from Missouri Southern State University.