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Ben Hamner

Co-founder & CTO, Kaggle

Ben Hamner is Kaggle’s co-founder and CTO. At Kaggle, he currently’s focused on creating tools that empower data scientists to frictionlessly collaborate on analytics and promote their results. He has worked with machine learning across many domains, including natural language processing, computer vision, web classification, and neuroscience. Prior to Kaggle, Ben applied machine learning to improve brain-computer interfaces as a Whitaker Fellow at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Lausanne, Switzerland. He graduated with a BSE in Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Math from Duke University.

Ben Hamner

Sessions / 2017 / 1 talk

  • The Right Stuff: Lessons Learned from a Decade of Data Engineering

    With more than a decade of Big Data experience now behind us, we’ll talk with a few veterans from the front lines about what skills mattered — and what didn't — on the first data engineering teams at Silicon Valley’s data-intensive start-ups. This will be a must-watch panel for those looking to build out a data-engineering function or get into the field themselves. We’ll explore the build vs. buy debate, looking at which classes of software teams hand-rolled, borrowed (and extended) from open-source projects, or bought - and discuss how that mix is changing. We’ll learn about the hardest parts of data pipelines and the data stack to build. And we’ll highlight the necessary skills that make data engineers different than data scientists.

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