Researchers have long said that the material published on the Web amounts to a form of “collective intelligence” that can be used to spot trends and make predictions.

Using his 20% time, a Google employee discovered that during flu season, many ailing Americans enter phrases like “flu symptoms” into Google and other search engines before they call their doctors. When he mapped this data, he was able to discover where flu outbreaks would strike up to two weeks before traditional news sources were able to report them. http://www.google.org/flutrends/

This is an example of a time when merging a specific type of data to its geographical coordinates resulted in a unique insight. However, there is much more to do with data and visualization. What was found at Google is only the tip of a very large iceberg. Now that we have access to so much data on the web, we're going to see an increasing need to understand and present that data.

Agenda: This meetup will serve as an introduction to what's going on in the world of data viz. It will be freeform, so if you would like to demonstrate something you're working on, please be prepared to do so. Micah Elliott will be showing uGraph and Ed Borasky will do a GGobi demo. I'll be covering what already exists in the ecosystem and what might become useful in the future. We're dealing with a rapid communication method here. Something that, if done well, compresses the time and space it takes for us to understand something.

If you're interested in Data Visualization, please come to this event. It will be the first Portland Tech Event at WebTrends besides Web Analytics Wednesday. It's our chance to try out the space and see if it is a good fit for this group or potentially for other groups in the future.

Google Group: Ed Borasky recently started a Google group called pdx-visualization. As the name implies, it is a group for Portland-area people interested in languages and techniques for visualization of data. http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-visualization

Amber Case, @caseorganic is a Cyborg Anthropologist studying the interaction between humans and computers and how our relationship with information is changing the way we think, act, and understand the world around us.

R, also called GNU S, is a strongly functional language and environment to statistically explore data sets and make many graphical displays of data.

R is widely used for statistical software development and data analysis. R is part of the GNU project, and its source code is freely available under the GNU General Public License, and pre-compiled binary versions are provided for various operating systems. R uses a command line interface, though several graphical user interfaces are available.

Ed Borasky will provide an introduction to R this Saturday at Cubespace from 11Am-3Pm. Please come prepared with a laptop and the requisite software (link to come soon). If you have any issues installing the software, or need help before the meeting, feel free to arrive at 10:30 Am.

Software Downloads Updated to get ready for the upcoming class. There will be a few more pages coming. The first will be on installing GGobi, and the second will be on CRAN Task Views.

Click on http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-visualization/web/getting-started-with-the-r-programming-language - or copy & paste it into your browser's address bar if that doesn't work.

Here's an abbreviated "Getting Started With GGobi" guide. Please try this stuff out and let me know where it's broken. I just ran through the Windows part and the "Testing on a Social Network Dataset" part and that much of it works. :)

Click on http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-visualization/web/getting-started-with-ggobi - or copy & paste it into your browser's address bar if that doesn't work.

I added a couple of links to articles on using GGobi with social network data.

Click on http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-visualization/web/getting-started-with-ggobi - or copy & paste it into your browser's address bar if that doesn't work.

About R

R was created by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and is now developed by the R Development Core Team. It is named partly after the first names of the first two R authors (Robert Gentleman and Ross Ihaka), and partly as a play on the name of S. The R language has become a de facto standard among statisticians for the development of statistical software.

More information: http://www.r-project.org/

Join the Portland Data Visualization Google Group for more updates: http://groups.google.com/group/pdx-visualization?hl=en.

We are the local R user group for Portland, Oregon. R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics (http://www.r-project.org/ ). Our goal is to support and share R experience and knowledge among its users in the Portland community. We would like to hear how you use and enjoy the R language and statistical programming environment.

At our initial meeting, we'll see how many people in the area use R and where your interests and backgrounds lie. Once we've made contact, our meetings may grow to include presentations or tutorials. Come and tell us what you'd like from your local R user group!

FREE BREAKFAST EVENT!!

Come network with your peers and learn more about the QlikView Business Discovery platform. Gartner recently called QlikView "the poster-child for a new, end-user driven approach to BI"

Featuring a case study from current customer Xerox.

If you are involved in reporting and business intelligence, as either a developer or business user, this session is for you.

Registration is required: http://cvent.com/d/7dqhyr/1Q

We are going to switch it up this month with PDX-UX's first group workshop. We'll present you with a small UX challenged interface in need of some pretty, some information design and even some data visualization skills. You and your peers will form groups and nosh on some solutions. Bring your brains and a laptop if you have one, and we'll provide the pens, giant pads of paper, food and drinks. We'll also be giving away some free books on data visualization courtesy of O'Reilly Media.

This meeting is sponsored by Thetus Corporation and O'Reilly Media

The Portland Tableau User Group will be meeting next Tuesday, August 6 from 5:30 to 7:00. Russell Christopher from Tableau will be presenting on the new Python Data Extract API.

Location:

Pacific University

222 SE 8th Ave

Creighton Hall, Room 518

Hillsboro, Oregon 97123

MAX: Tuality Hospital/SE 8th Ave MAX Station

Parking: Hillsboro Intermodal Transit Facility

Agenda:

• 5:30 Greetings and introductions
• 5:40 Presentation on Data Extract API – Python version - Russell Christopher - Tableau Sales Consultant
• 6:10 Q&A
• 6:25 Group discussion (e.g., resources, future topics)
• 6:45 Networking

Join the Portland Tableau User Group

• Tableau Communities
• LinkedIn Group

You've done your research and have a pile of information. Learn how to turn that information into an impressive research package by profiling your audience (clients, faculty, students, management), assessing their needs and learning styles, and creating meaningful charts and info-graphics guaranteed to impress.

Schedule: 1-2pm - Reece Dano: Ethnographic Research: Going Beyond WHAT and Getting to WHY 2-3pm - Temese Szalai: Delivering Insights, Not Information 3-4pm - Jackie Wirz: Fundamentals of Data Visualization: Creating Beautiful, Elegant and Descriptive Visual Displays After 4pm - Happy hour at [to be announced]

Attend one session or all three. Coffee/Tea and snacks (from Pacific Pie Co., sponsored by ProQuest) will be provided between sessions. Join us at a nearby bar for a no-host social hour after the third session.

Steve Mayzak from Elasticsearch Inc. will be on hand to talk all about Elasticsearch's latest 1.0 release, including cool new features like aggregations. He'll also be going over some basics of how Elasticsearch works with Logstash for logging and Kibana for data visualization.

And if we are quite fortunate some of the engineers at Mozilla will be talking about how they use the Elasticsearch ELK stack (that's Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana combined) to do all the things.

Please RSVP on meetup.com so we order enough food.

http://www.meetup.com/The-Portlandia-ElasticSearch-Meetup-Group/events/161655702/

Come hungry for knowledge and noms, as we'll have beer and food on offer.

Civic Data Design Challenge

A project with Hack Oregon and PNCA

In our Civic Data Visualization Workshop, Hack Oregon and PNCA students have been working on a project to redesign the way Oregonians understand and interact with campaign funding in our state.

Join us for a day of creative co-working as we invite the community to use our API to tackle other creative challenges with data surrounding this election year.

We'll also show a sneak peak of our beta product before the official launch in May.

Don't worry if you're not technical-- every person has a valuable perspective and we'll have mentors from the politcal, tech, and design community to help bring ideas to life.

Register your own team, bring your own project pitch, or join others at the event.

Want to know more about our project and design workshop?

Follow our blog at hackoregon.org

Have a great time at the Hackathon and want to keep hanging out?

Missed the Hackathon and want to know more about our visualization projects?

Come to Rom Toms Wednesday and we'll have a few beers, unpack our progress from Saturday, and brainstorm next steps.

Looks like it will be a beautiful warm evening on the patio.

See you soon,

Catherine

Hack Oregon's "Behind the Curtain" campaign finance visualization is continuing to build momentum, and we're inviting anyone who is curious to come collaborate with us.

This week's build session will focus on implementing visualizations for a local candidate dashboard.

We've also fleshed out a wire frame to give more agency to front-end the front-end team.

FYI: the dataset is deep and nuanced super compelling-- some people find it a little addictive. If it's your first time, think about joining us Wednesday @RonToms for our #Beerpatioathon to get a head start on intro conversation.

Look forward to seeing you,

RSVP @hackoregon

Over the past few months we've shared many beers and pizzas while learning about campaign finance as it relates to data science and user design.

Our Design Team has been hard at work transforming all of our R&D from the Behind the Curtain Project into our final production model.

Get ready for a Blitzkreig of Hackathons as we get ever closer to unveiling a new way to understand influence and elections. (You know, with like, actual facts?)

Moving forward, we're assembling our best teams for the final build stage.

Come to our Hack Oregon Community Summit, Thursday May 22 @Instrument 6-8pm where you can meet the team leaders, learn the build plan, and join a team!

We'll also be demo-ing our front end design and giving a short talk on some of the insights that drove our strategy--- to include revelations about how normal people feel about interacting with two mysterious subjects like politics and data.

If you are thinking about joining a team, here's what we are looking for:

Data Science Team (seeking 4 members)

Spatial Data Team (seeking 5 members)

Data Viz Team (seeking 3 members)

Super Activist Team (seeking 5 members non-technical OK)

RSVP for beer and pizza count: hackoregonsummit.eventbrite.come

Interested in being a web developer, or expanding your existing knowledge? Come and learn more about how Portland Code School can give you the skills you want with the support you need. Discover what our accelerated learning programs can do for you!

We're launching a whole new category of class for existing developers looking to add new tools to their toolset! We'll be starting with Data Visualization and Mobile Development for iOS and Phonegap. In honor of our new classes, we'll also be raffling off a discount code for our intermediate classes worth $500!

At this event, you can talk with the staff, meet current and past students, introduce yourself to other prospective students. We’ll socialize while we eat, drink, and otherwise be merry!

Not quite ready for an intermediate level class? Sign up for our Web Development Primer. If you sign up for the Primer class at this event, you'll receive a $100 discount!

More election data mining and data visualizing. We're almost finished with our Behind the Curtain beta... and it's getting exciting!

spatial data, data viz, non-tech politicos, data science, designers--- we love you!

Check out hackoregon.org to find out more about the BTC project.

Special Thanks to Squishy Media for sponsoring our coding comfort and hacking vices.

We're still working on our Behind the Curtain project to promote transparency in for campaign finance in Oregon. Read more on

http://hackoregon.org

Curious first timers welcome!

We have tasks for all types, advanced and beginner, technical and non-technical.

Pizza for all.

We're still working on our Behind the Curtain project to promote transparency in for campaign finance in Oregon. Read more on hackoregon.org

Curious first timers welcome!

We have tasks for all types, advanced and beginner, technical and non-technical.

Pizza for all.

July's theme is: ANALYZING YOUR DATA

As QSers, we generate data like crazy, but many of us don't know what to do with it from there.

At this meetup, we're going to talk about what to do once you have data. If you have some data that you have worked through, I encourage you to come share the process with us so that we can all learn!

We'll also have a person or two from the Portland Data Science Group there to give us some analysis tips from the experts.

Here's our agenda:
Informal Social and Gadget Time - Starting at 6pm
Come early to socialize with other QSers and share what hardware, apps, and other technologies are helping you track your life. Bring your gadgets so that we can all see them, play with them, and hear your experiences with them!

Intro and Announcements - 6:30 sharp!

Show and Tell
Just like when you were in kindergarten, we encourage you to share something within the theme of the meetup. It doesn't a formal presentation, and can be as much as 10 minutes or as short as you like. Let us know in advance to guarantee your slot.

Tracking your mood with your smartphone? Recording your workouts, diet and/or weight? Using a Fitbit, Withings scale, or heart-rate monitor?

Quantified Self is "self-knowledge through numbers" and we want to hear your self-tracking stories! Sign up to give a talk. Our content comes from our community. Show us your graphs, spreadsheets, biometric devices, practical solutions and crazy notions. They are all welcome. We focus on real self-tracking projects involving your personal data.

Or just bring your enthusiasm and come to marvel and learn with us. Sharing is not required if you're just curious to see what this is about! Agenda:

• 6 to 6:30 pm: Doors open. Social time. This is an opportunity to meet other self-trackers and catch up with friends.

• 6:30 pm: Intro to QS plus news. We'll provide a brief intro about QS, as well as, what's been happening in the past months in the news on how people are finding meaning from their personal data.

• 6:45 to 7:15 pm: Scheduled Show&Tell talks. These are 7 minute talks with 5 minutes for questions. This is the meat & potatoes of QS meetups. This is an opportunity to share your story with your peers. Please contact us in advance if you want to give one. We'll send out a list of speakers in advance of the meet up.

• 7:15 to 7:45 pm: Walk-on Show&Tell talks. These are 5 minutes with time for a couple questions. They are signed up for on the day of the event, using a sheet at the welcome table. We’ll go through as many as we can, time permitting.

• 7:45 to 8:30 pm: We'll open things up for general discussion if there's anything that someone wants to bring up to the group. Then we'll break and hang out for awhile. This is a good opportunity to talk with presenters If you're interested in doing a Show&Tell, please mention it in your RSVP or email the organizers in advance. You can also sign up on the day of the event as a walk-on.

We can't wait to see you there!

-Steven, Rob, Mark, Ioan

DEMO DAY 2016

Hack Oregon has been hard at work since February using data to find insight on important topics facing our state. We've had over 100 volunteers contribute over 10,000 man hours to bring you one night of data-driven wonderment!

Join us as we unleash a new set of open data projects that will change the way you see Oregon.

Kindly RSVP on Eventbrite
datadispatches.eventbrite.com

Project Teasers

"Oregon Hunger Equation"
Food Insecurity

Year after year, Oregon has one of the highest reported rates of food insecurity in the country. If you ask the question, "Who's hungry?":

The answer is kids.

The data is clear, but the reality is hard. We've made a dynamic program to explore systemic causes of hunger at home by placing a special focus on resources available to families with young children including regional cost of living, state benefit programs, and inequalities local schools districts.

"Behind the Curtain”
Campaign Finance

We're lifting the veil off election politics with a fascinating high-level view of influence and money in Oregon's election cycles.

Hack Oregon has the only machine readable database for local campaign finance in the country, and we've learned that influence is as much about relationships as it about dollars. And at the local level, your vote matters A LOT.

This year, we've added new meta-data to reveal effects of industry buy-in and individual patronage during an election cycle... with a few surprises. Unlock the real story behind politics and feel ultra-empowered as a voter this November.

“Plot PDX”
Urban Development

Data can tell us a lot about our neighborhoods. At a time when Portland is experiencing rapid growth and change, it's more important than ever that all communities have equal access to information that can inform decisions about the future of our city.

We're giving the community access to a range of data which has never been available on one platform. Explore Portland's neighborhoods as you've never seen them before, on topics that you care about, like demolitions, crime, and the rising cost of rent.

“Crop Compass"
Agriculture

In the Pacific Northwest, we live in one of the most rich biospheres in the world, with global demand for Oregon grown products. We have the ability to produce a wide range of food in Oregon, but we're far from self-sustaining.

How much of our regional vitality is retained inside of Oregon, and how much do we ship out? How do our economic and environmental factors work together to shape our food system? We've created a tool that gives insight into multi-dimensional patterns across land use, crop diversity, subsidies, seasonality, and import/export trends to help understand more about the mechanics of how food gets from farm to table.

"Programming to Progress"
Education

Across Oregon, some schools are lucky enough to have free or low-cost summer school programming and/or after school programming--- and the playing field is not level.

How much of a difference does after school and summer school programming make for early literacy, attendance, and future academic success of students? Hack Oregon has the first aggregate statewide analysis of the link between performance and expanded programming, with some surprising implications of region-wide impact that goes beyond the classroom.

Please join us for a night of conversation on self tracking and monitoring where you share ideas, tools and experiments with the Portland Quantified Self community.

This is a special meeting for we will be joined by Gary Wolf, the co-founder of Quantified Self and Sara Riggare, a QS community member from Sweden and person with Parkinson's.

This event is occurring just before the World Parkinson Congress, which we are lucky to be having in Portland this year. To kick it off, Sara is having her own event on Sunday , 9/18) focused specifically on using QS to manage Parkinson's.

If you are self tracking in any way – life logging, biometrics, athletic performance, mood, sleep, medical symptoms, happiness, energy, etc. – come and share your methods, results and insight.

Here's our agenda:

•Informal Social Time - Starting at 6pm
Come early to socialize with other QSers and share what hardware, apps, and other technologies you are currently finding useful.

•Intro and Announcements - 6:15 sharp!
We'll have a round of introductions, and Gary Wolf will kick off the evening.

•Presentations - 6:30 to 7:30

    • Lillian Karabaic - My Quantified Self Zine

    • Sara Riggare - Using Data to Manage Parkinson's

    • Hobson Lane - NLP Sentiment Analysis of My Daily Journal

    • Steven Jonas - Learning to Like New Music With Spaced Repetition

•Post-talks Social Time - 7:30 to 8 pm
After some amazing presentations, we will have some time to converse with those around us.

*Where our talks come from: Our talks come from you! Do you have a personal self-tracking story to share? Please let us know in your RSVP. You can let the three prime questions guide your presentation: What did you do? How did you do it? What did you learn?

Here are some examples from previous Quantified Self events: http://vimeo.com/groups/quantifiedself/videos/27380858 http://vimeo.com/28734230

Our thanks to Kyoko and Kaitlynn at Puppet and for lending us this space.

The world produces more than 2.5 exabytes of data every day. There is just too much information out there and traditional reports using tabs, rows and columns do not paint the whole picture any longer.

Visualization is one key approach to gaining insight from this mountain of data. Advanced Visualizations Platforms have enabled the use of more dynamic and interactive business graphics, such as real-time dashboards and charts that update automatically as the data changes. It enables knowledge workers to see the trends and patterns (along with gaps and outliers) in the data that are not as easily identified in rows and columns of numbers. Even Data Scientists are leveraging advanced visualizations tools to explore, understand and communicate insights, along with the actions that need to be taken.

In this session, we will explore how advanced visualization tools are being utilized in the era of big data to draw valuable business insights and we will also delve into some of the predominant data visualization tools being used by Data Scientists.

Speaker

Amit P. Manghani, M.S., MBA, has more than a decade of experience in the Information Technology domain dealing with Enterprise Information Management, Business Intelligence, Web Applications and Cloud Computing technologies at leading Information Management companies such as Oracle, Informatica and SAP. Prior to joining Oracle, Amit was focused on utilizing the power of emerging data integration technologies encompassing real-time data acquisition/ movement, event processing and agile data access within Big Data usage scenarios. Now as Senior Director of Product Management at Oracle, he is responsible for enabling partners globally on the different facets of Oracle Sales Cloud ranging from Analytics to Mobile to Sales Prediction capabilities. He is an avid follower of technology trends and has published articles in leading online journals and has presented at several technology conferences.

Schedule

• 8:30 - 9:00 am - Sign In
• 9:00 - 10:15 am - Presentation
• 10:15 - 10:30 am - Break, Chapter Announcements
• 10:30 - 11:30 am - Presentation continued

• Free for Members and employees of our Corporate Members
• There is a nominal charge for non-members to cover refreshments and speaker travel costs
• $5 for Students with valid student ID / $15 for General public
• See the list of DAMA PDX corporate members at damapdx.org

About DAMA PDX

The Portland Metro Chapter of the Data Administration Management Association has been serving our Portland data community since 1984. We are a not-for-profit, vendor independent, professional association dedicated to advancing the concepts and practices of enterprise information and data resource management. Our Mission: Deliver thought provoking data-centric presentations to make you more successful in your job.

"Data Visualization Techniques to Discover Optimization Opportunities"

Every day, we create over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data, and we'll create more tomorrow than we did today. As digital marketers, we swim through this sea of information and opportunity. But where to? And how can we read these currents? At this month's Camp Optimization, Justin Wade, eRoi's performance analyst, will share powerful—and practical—data visualization techniques to help you discover opportunities, interpret hidden patterns, and tell better stories through data.

Come to hear Justin's insights and share a free beer or glass of wine with Portland's top digital marketing, design and optimization professionals. We're at Revolution Hall, second floor of the Washington High School in Southeast Portland.

What is Camp Optimization? Camp Optimization's mission is simple: provide a casual, fun and informative forum for digital marketers and technologists to share optimization best practices, challenges and wins.

Who is roboboogie? Roboboogie is a Portland-based digital experience optimization agency partnering closely with brands to improve conversion rates, nurture brand advocacy and increase customer value.

This will be the first event in a series we're doing on Natural Language Processing.  It will be a highly accessible workshop covering the concepts of n-grams and bag-of-words.  We will work within the Python Notebook (Jupyter).

Allen Grimm will be presenting content / guiding the workshop.  With years of experience in modeling and predicting user behavior, he has recently begun several NLP projects and is looking forward to sharing the first steps of his journey.  Contact him through: GitHub, LinkedIn, Twitter, 

Event Structure:

• 6:45 - Doors open.

• 7:00 - Assistance with Jupyter installation and a mini-course in using the notebook will begin at 7.

• 7:20 - The NLP content will begin.

• 8:00 - Networking.

• 8:30 - We'll head to The Upper Lip, where we dig deep into data science topics over a beer

For this night we'll hold lightning talks, in which speakers have five minutes to share projects, ideas, or principles of data visualization! Here's how it'll go:

Each speaker gets five minutes at most

We'll have 4 to 6 speakers

We'll probably do Q&A at the end rather than between talks, to stay on schedule

Here are some tips on giving a great lightning talk. This is a great opportunity for both seasoned and new speakers alike, whether to hone an idea or as an initial test of an idea you'd like to explore further.

If you plan on speaking

Please use this form to pitch it. If I get more than 8 pitches, I may ask people to vote or ask some people to do theirs at a later time!

* Submit slides by 5pm the night before, Wednesday 2/8!

Schedule

5:30 - 6 | Networking, food & drink

6 - 7ish | Talks

7ish on | Feedback on talks, more networking

Please join us for a night of conversation on self-tracking and monitoring where you share ideas, tools and experiments with the Portland Quantified Self community.

If you are self tracking in any way – life logging, biometrics, athletic performance, mood, sleep, medical symptoms, happiness, energy, etc. – come and share your methods, results and insight.

Here's our agenda:

Intro and Announcements - 6:10 sharp!
We'll have a round of introductions, and then Steven will give a quick primer on QS as a movement and recap some of the most interesting self-tracking projects he's seen in the past couple of months.

Presentations* - 6:20 to 7:30 (Confirmed talks with more to come) -Steven - Using smell to improve flashcard performance -Mark - Update on my metric-collecting exercise chair

If you have a project you can talk about, let us know when you sign up!

Post-talks Social Time - 7:30 to 8 pm
After some amazing presentations, we will have some time to converse with those around us.

*Where our talks come from: Our talks come from you! Do you have a personal self-tracking story to share? Please let us know in your RSVP. You can let the three prime questions guide your presentation:What did you do? How did you do it? What did you learn?

Here are some examples from previous Quantified Self events:
http://vimeo.com/groups/quantifiedself/videos/27380858
http://vimeo.com/28734230

Parking: Lots of 5-hour metered street parking and nearby parking lots (for weekdays check out 1602 SW Taylor and 1201 SW Yamhill), and free 2-hour parking north of Burnside.

About our Club

http://www.freeknowledgemission.org/ 

We're located inside the North entrance of the Nike Victory/Edo Building in Air Zoom Blade Conference Room.

Come join us every Sunday at the Tech Academy. This is an interactive discussion group, with digital projector and whiteboard. Anybody can jump up, give their opinion or ask a question. We cover from fundamentals to advance. Everyone is a teacher and student.

We discuss everything from predictive analytics, machine learning, data pipelines, autonomous vehicles to Python and R programming.

Come join us for a panel discussion with Larry Gonzales, an internal recruiter from Intel, and others, in the Hillsdale Library Meeting Room. It is a large room with a capacity of upto 46 people.

The host and panel will discuss what recruiters look for for data-driven positions, from your Resume, Linkedin profile, Kaggle, Github accounts, etc. Lots of tips and advice from the "inside".

Questions will then be opened to the attendees.

Automation is the future of computing and conversational interfaces are the future of human-computer interactions. However, creating these systems requires us to reverse engineer some of the most fundamental aspects of life, which can be difficult and overwhelming — especially if you don’t know where to start. 

 Designing Intelligence will: 
• Help the you understand what’s happening in the artificial intelligence space and where it’s been. 
• Explain why you’ll be making one of these systems sooner than you think. 
• Teach you how to create the products that will thrive in the age of automation. 
• Give you language to help you sell your ideas to your team and bring your dreams to life. This is one talk you’ll regret missing.

Guest Speaker Joe Toscano will be presenting - @realjoet.

Formerly an Experience Designer for R/GA, Joe worked as a consultant for Google, where he and his team oversaw the Google product ecosystem and helped Google take products to market. This meant he and his team had to understand how each product strategically fit within the Google ecosystem now, how each product would evolve, over time, and how the decisions being made by individual teams would affect Google’s larger business goals, as a whole. Understanding this allowed him and his team to be confident that the decisions they were making would strategically move Google’s business forward.

Joe has since left his job at R/GA to pursue writing his book, Designing Intelligence. The book is being written to help people understand the current state of automation, where it's been and where it's going, how to design products that will thrive in the age of automation, and what role we, as technical talent, play in creating an inclusive future through automation. He hopes to help create ethical automation designers who not only understand best practices of making these systems but also understand the impact they'll be making on the world, through automation.

Note the earlier-than-normal start time of 6p.

11:00 - noon : Instruction ,
noon - 2pm : Social / Discussion ,

Come join us every Sunday morning at the Tech Academy.This is an interactive and immersive instructor lead meeting. This week we will cover the basic foundations of preparing datasets, simple and multiple linear regression, decision trees, ensemble methods and confusion matrices.

We use a digital project and whiteboard. The course is given at a comfortable pace, so that any attendee can interrupt and ask a question. No question is too small or wrong.

We ask all the attendees to be patient so that everyone attending learns at the same pace so that all attendees are at the same level at the end of the hour.

Attendees are encouraged to stay for our following event Hack Days, which is a open discussion, projects and socializing for beginners to advance.

Alberto Cairo is a leading expert on data visualization. As a professor, author, journalist, and consultant to groups including Google and the European Union, Alberto helps people organize information to enlighten and reveal. In 2017 he launched this Visual Trumpery tour, offering to waive his speaking fee to any organization that would host him for a public talk examining the misleading charts and graphs being designed across the political spectrum. He has been crisscrossing the globe discussing how to assess the reliability, truthfulness, and accuracy of graphics in this political time. Alberto is currently the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the School of Communication of the University of Miami. He is the author of The Functional Art: An Introduction to Information Graphics and Visualization and The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication.

How is immersive technology changing lives within Healthcare? From treating pain in burn victims, helping paralyzed individuals gain sensations, to changing patterns in the brain, immersive technology has only just begun to show us its potential uses in the healthcare industry. Come out of an engaging evening of community networking, food, demos, and three presentation exploring the future of healthcare.

Purchase your tickets:
https://impactflow.com/event/changing-lives-emerging-applications-in-health-care-6935

This month we are going to continue the new format of talks beginning at 6:30, with an additional 30 minutes of networking at the end of the event. Be prepared for talks to begin at 6:30pm!

Agenda

5:30pm - Doors Open / Food / Drinks / Demos / Networking
6:30pm - Event/Talks Begin!
8:00pm - Networking
8:30pm - Event Ends and After Party at Portland City Grill

Raina Tamakawa & Darren Connor - Providence Health

Can Virtual Reality improve pain for post-surgery cancer patients?

The epidemic of opioid addiction is a well-documented consequence of our approach to treating pain. As part of Providence Health & Services’ work in the research and development of alternatives to opioids, a team set out to test the effectiveness of Virtual Reality as a pain treatment for gastrointestinal malignancy​ surgery patients.

Daren is a Product Manager with Ambulatory Services at Providence Health & Services in Portland where he collaborates with clinical experts in sleep disorders, sports medicine, diabetes, physical therapy and chronic pain to develop new offerings and improve existing services.​

Raina is a clinical research supervisor at Providence Cancer Institute. She has a BS in Chemistry from Pacific University and an MS in Pharmaceutical Science from the University of British Columbia.​

Frances Ayalasomayajula - HP - Applications of Virtual Reality in Healthcare

With advances in computer technology and software sophistication, the robustness and
pervasiveness of VR solutions continues to progress. Healthcare-minded technologist are producing more impactful experiences for users and more clinically relevant applications. In this session, Fran Ayalasomayajula, HP’s Global Healthcare Lead for Population Health Information Technology and Innovations will take us on an exploration of virtual reality in healthcare, beginning with an overview of the technology by market segment, including medical education and training, patient education, surgical planning and digital therapeutics.

Purchase your tickets:
https://impactflow.com/event/changing-lives-emerging-applications-in-health-care-6935

Thank you to our sponsors for helping make these events possible:

New Relic provides the real-time insights that software-driven businesses need to innovate faster. We're hiring for a variety of positions in our Portland Headquarters, browse our open jobs and join us!

Perkins Coie represents market leaders in AR and VR technology, products, services and content. We assist our clients in raising capital for new ventures, protecting intellectual property, distribution, licensing, regulatory compliance and a wide variety of other legal services.
https://perkinscoie.com/AR/VR

The Khronos Group was founded in 2000 to provide a structure for key industry players to cooperate in the creation of open standards that deliver on the promise of cross-platform technology. Today, Khronos is a not for profit, member-funded consortium dedicated to the creation of royalty-free open standards for graphics, parallel computing, vision processing, and dynamic media. www.Khronos.org

Make sure to grab your tickets on ImpactFlow:
https://impactflow.com/event/changing-lives-emerging-applications-in-health-care-6935

Speaker panel: "A Jetsons or Bladerunner future for our metropolitan areas - are we on the brink of a technology sea-change for Smart Cities?"

Stan Curtis (Urban.Systems),
Kevin Martin (City of Portland),
Kristin Tufte (PSU),
Dave Pelkey (Azimith Communications)
,
Moderator: Bud Borja (CGI).

The idea of Smart Cities has been around for a while. It encapsulates how technology is going to transform the way we interact with City government & infrastructure, local businesses and our communities. It is very exciting to consider all the transformational possibilities when cities are digitally enabled, as well as the impact of emerging technology such as self-driving cars on the City administrative model and the local economy. But what are the barriers to realizing this future? Which cities are having successes and which are having failures? How about our own City of Portland and other cities in the metropolitan area?


Join us for the SIM Portland April 2018 meeting when we will review what is happening with IT and Smart Cities. We will have a panel of thought leaders speaking on NextGen wired and wireless network, Internet of Things (IoT) and sensors, autonomous vehicles, as well as big data & visualization. Come learn what new opportunities and challenges are here today and on the horizon. 



Key topics that will be explored include,


• Review of Smart Cities planning and strategies to date.
• Major technology areas being tackled by Smart Cities groups and collaborations.
• Examples of Smart Cities projects successes and failures.
• What does this all mean to IT leadership? What should IT infrastructure be prepared for?

Agenda
5:30 PM Social
6:30 PM Dinner
6:50 PM Meeting Start
7:00 PM Keynote and Q&A
8:15 PM Close

Please join us for a night of conversation on self-tracking where we share ideas, tools and experiments with the Portland Quantified Self community. A special treat, Gary Wolf, the co-founder of Quantified Self will be in attendance!

If you keep track of your life in any way – life logging, athletic performance, mood, sleep, medical symptoms, happiness, energy, etc. – come and share your methods, results and insight.

Here's our agenda:

Intro and Announcements - 6:15 sharp!

Presentations - 6:30 to 7:30

• Steven - Lessons learned from Bloodtesters (group research in the spirit of self-experimentation). • Mike - Does mindfulness and physical training actually affect my attention? • Heather - How I monitor the quality of my artistic process. • Gary - 7 years of meditation tracking • Anton - Using stimulus control for school work. • Alec - I made a tool to help see meditation in a new way. • Plus more! Let us know if you have a project to share when you sign up.

Social Time - 7:30 to 8 pm After some amazing presentations, we will have some time to converse with those around us.

Where our talks come from: Our talks come from you! Do you have a personal self-tracking story to share? Please let us know in your RSVP. You can let the three prime questions guide your presentation:

What did you do? How did you do it? What did you learn?

Here are examples from previous Quantified Self events:
• Ellis Bartholomeus: My Health Scars.
• Kyrill Potapov: Tracking Productivity for Personal Growth.
• Whitney Erin Boesel: My Numbers Sucked But I Made This Baby Anyway.

Curious about how to make rich data visualizations accessible? Doug Schepers will share some of his work on how to create equivalent data viz experiences.

Images, charts, and diagrams are an important part of the web, but often hide critical information from people with disabilities of vision, cognition, and others. But there are many ways to provide inclusive affordances that use other senses, especially hearing and touch, to convey complex information. This talk will explore some of the challenges and different methods to overcome them using advanced techniques like text equivalents, sonification, haptics and tactiles, and more.

Event begins at 6:00pm; join early starting at 5:45pm for networking.

Online/call-in meeting info will be announced on Meetup.

Agenda:

• 5:45–6:00pm Networking
• 6:00–6:15pm Introductions & announcements
• 6:15-7:00pm Presentations
• 7:00–7:30pm Q&A and discussion
• 7:30–7:45pm Wrap up

Accommodation requests:

If you have any accommodation requests, please contact us in advance of the event to discuss.

About the presenter:

Doug Schepers is the founder and director of Fizz Studio, an accessible data visualization startup in Chapel Hill, NC, USA. He develop his ideas and early prototypes for accessible charts while working with the accessibility community at W3C. As a developer who defined Web technologies and standards at W3C for a decade, he launched or worked on fundamental projects such as SVG (and the Accessible SVG Task Force), WebApps, Web Audio API, Touch Events and Pointer Events, Web Annotations, and many other technologies, as well as starting the W3C developer relations program. He believes in positive social change through building communities and interoperable open technology.

Join us for a talk, workshop and community building event with Karla Starr - acclaimed science and business writer, speaker and author of the book Making Numbers Count: The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers.

Hosted by Data Visualization Society's Portland chapter and the PDX Data Visualization Meetup group.

Learn more and register via the Meetup page or the DVS Eventbriite page.

Hope to see you there!