All speakers

Ahmed Elsamadisi

Founder & CEO, Narrator

Ahmed is the founder and CEO of Narrator. Narrator enables companies to make better decisions by providing them with the ability to answer any question in under 10 minutes. Ahmed started his career building algorithms for self-driving cars and human-robot interaction. He then joined Raytheon to develop AI algorithms for missile defense, focusing on tracking and discrimination. In 2015, Ahmed joined WeWork as the first hire on their data team. He built their data engineering infrastructure and grew the team of data engineers and analysts. Recently, Ahmed was recognized as one of Forbes’ 30 under 30 for 2021

Ahmed Elsamadisi

Sessions / 2023 / 1 talk

  • How to End the Long-tail of Most Data Requests?

    Modern data stacks focus on the most common use-cases and dashboards, but what about all the ad-hoc requests that come? The current tool set fails to allow data analysts to iterate easily with stakeholders. In this talk, we will discuss that without an ad-hoc layer, data analysts are left to answer questions with hacky live SQL or have every request go through the resource-intensive and expensive production processes and workflows. An ad-hoc layer solves this by allowing data analysts to answer data questions, change their mind, and deliver data dumps or simple analyses incredibly fast and reliably. Allowing them to prioritize putting it into production only if it needs to be reused.

Sessions / 2022 / 1 talk

  • How to Finally Get Self-Service ... By Ditching the Star Schema

    Ahmed will dive into why self-service so frequently fails: it's a data modeling problem. The current approach of using a star schema as a data model fails to support adhoc questions because it requires predefined JOINS. Ahmed will present the activity schema, an alternative data model that requires no joins or foreign keys. A single 10-column table (with a single, standard structure) can model any data for analytics and answer any question. Narrator uses the Activity Schema to enable a new era of self-service where anyone can answer any question in under 10 minutes.

Ready to take this stage?

The next edition is programmed by practitioners. Tell us what you built and what you learned.

Apply to be a speaker