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Announcing our great lineup of featured speakers for the Microsoft Data Insights Summit!

Headshot of article author The Power BI Team

We recently shared our full session catalog for this year’s Microsoft Data Insights Summit. This week we want to highlight some of the featured speakers we’ll have at the event. The Data Insights Summit includes an amazing mix of BI experts, product partners, community members, and Microsoft product engineers – all at the conference to help you learn how make the most of your data. We’re thrilled to spotlight Amanda Cofsky, Brian Jones, Chris Webb, Danielle Dean, Jennifer Stirrup, Justyna Lucznik, Kim Manis, Marco Russo, and Rob Collie.

Amanda is a program manager on the Power BI Desktop team, and her focus is on enabling analysts to create beautiful and insights visualizations. You may already know her from the Power BI blogs and YouTube videos where she walks through how to use all the new and exciting features in Power BI.

Brian runs the Excel Program Management team and has been in the Office engineering organization for more than 17 years. He’s worked on Word, VBA, file formats, Office and SharePoint extensibility, Office web add-ins, Forms, and Access. Brian is passionate about building tools that help people solve problems, and sees Excel as the premier application in the Office suite for people who want to gain deeper insights and get things done.

Chris is an independent consultant and trainer specializing in Microsoft Power BI and SQL Server Analysis Services. He is the author of Power Query for Power BI and Excel and a co-author of SQL Server Analysis Services 2012: The BISM Tabular Model, Expert Cube Development with SQL Server 2008 Analysis Services, and MDX Solutions with Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services 2005 and Hyperion Essbase. He also blogs at http://blog.crossjoin.co.uk.

Danielle is a Senior Data Scientist Lead at Microsoft Corp. in the Algorithms and Data Science Group within the Cloud and Enterprise Division. She currently leads an international team of data scientists and engineers to build predictive analytics and machine learning solutions for external companies utilizing the Cortana Intelligence Suite. Before working at Microsoft, Danielle was a data scientist at Nokia, where she produced business value and insights from big data, through data mining & statistical modeling on data-driven projects that impacted a range of businesses, products and initiatives. Danielle completed her Ph.D. in quantitative psychology with a concentration in biostatistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2015, where she studied the application of multi-level event history models to understand the timing and processes leading to events between dyads within social networks.

Jennifer, recently named as one of the top 10 most influential Business Intelligence female experts in the world by Solutions Review, is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP, and PASS Director-At-Large, and a well-known Business Intelligence and Data Visualization expert, author, data strategist, and community advocate. She has also been peer-recognized as one of the top 100 most global influential tweeters on big data and analytics topics. As the sole owner of a boutique Business Intelligence, Business Analytics, and Data Science consultancy, Jennifer has delivered varied projects which include leading organizations such as the National Health Service trust and private companies to the cloud, while also spearheading a Data Science Program from soup-to-nuts for a Government department.

Justyna is a Program Manager in the Business Applications Platform Group. Justyna works on developing and evangelizing solution templates which bring together the Microsoft Azure stack, as well as Power BI and PowerApps. Her most recent focus has been the Twitter and Bing News solution templates for brand and campaign managers. Prior to joining the product group, Justyna worked in the Microsoft Consulting Services in the United Kingdom. She created machine learning models for customers in the financial and digital marketing sectors, utilizing Power BI, Azure Machine Learning and R.

Kim is Group Program Manager for the Power BI Desktop team. Her team is focused on unlocking new capabilities for data analysts to model, explore and visualize their data. Before her time on the Power BI team, Kim worked on all sorts of products ranging from productivity software, social networks, and online retail.

Marco is a Business Intelligence consultant and mentor. He has worked with Analysis Services since 1999, and written several books about Power Pivot, Power BI, Analysis Services Tabular, and the DAX language. With Alberto Ferrari, he writes the content published on www.sqlbi.com, mentoring companies’ users about the new Microsoft BI technologies. Marco is also a speaker at international conferences such as Microsoft Ignite, PASS Summit, PASS BA Conference, and SQLBits.

Rob spent the first 14 years of his career at Microsoft as an engineering leader on Excel, Bing, and SQL. Subsequently he founded PowerPivotPro, the world’s first consulting company focused solely on Microsoft’s self-service BI and analytics platform (Power BI and Power Pivot). His company has led hundreds of organizations in their adoption of those tools, unlocking truly revolutionary capabilities and ROI across a wide spectrum of industries. Rob believes that this new wave of software represents the first truly impactful upgrade in the world of data since the advent of spreadsheets in the 1980’s – bigger than “BI,” “Big Data,” and every other buzz phrase combined. He tries to bring a down to earth an honest perspective to every topic, informed by a rich range of experience over his 20-year career in data and software. Rob is the bestselling author of books such as DAX Formulas for Power Pivot and Power Pivot and Power BI, a popular speaker at both technical and financial conferences, and sincerely wants you to see, for yourself, the life-changing benefits that await you.

We hope you are as excited about our strong line up of featured speakers as we are! Join us at the Microsoft Data Insights Summit and meet Amanda, Brian, Chris, Danielle, Jennifer, Justyna, Kim, Marco, and Rob!