David Sweenor, senior director, portfolio marketing, Alteryx

First dabbling with machine learning (ML) during college, I co-oped for a small research company who specialized in artificial neural networks. My big project was to analyze biometric data which led to a couple of scientific papers on predicting mortality using neural networks.  

Post-college, I worked for IBM Microelectronics as a yield characterization engineer. This meant that I had to apply analytics and data science to try and understand why semiconductor yields were not high enough. If you’re not familiar with semiconductors, a wafer can go through 1200 different process steps and take from between three to six months to build. I had data of every type - electrical, measurement, optical, text, spatial, logistics, test… you name it. It was a great way to learn data science. After that, I moved from complaining about data systems… straight to the source. I joined the data warehousing team to try and fix those systems myself. Five years later, I ended up working in IBM’s business analytics center of competency. 

After spending over a decade at IBM, I turned to the dark side of marketing. I’ve worked for many household-name data and analytics companies and, in my current role at Alteryx, I am responsible for GTM strategy for the analytics, data science and machine learning as part of the portfolio marketing team. 

Additionally, I have published six books on analytics, with the most recent being a TinyTechGuide titled Artificial Intelligence: An Executive Guide to Make AI Work for Your Business.