Natasha Balac, PhD, is the director of Predictive Analytics Center of Excellence (PACE) at SDSC that encompasses many data mining projects including collaborations with the School of Medicine, Smart Energy Grid, and Medicaid fraud detection. Natasha has received her Master's and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University with an emphasis in Machine Learning and Data Mining from large data sets. Her dissertation focused on creating and applying novel data mining techniques to mobile robots and real time sensor data. She has been with SDSC since 2003. Previously, she has been working on mining, analytics and bioinformatics in the biotech industry. She has also led multiple collaborations across a wide range of organizations in industry, government and academia with funding from the CMS, NSF, NIH, and CEC. Currently Dr. Balac is directing PACE, aimed at leveraging SDSC’s data-intensive expertise and resources to help create the next generation of data scientists by leading a collaborative, nationwide education and training effort among academia, industry, and government. PACE Center has a number of ongoing research collaborations and projects with industry and government, especially focused on mining Big Data using Gordon, a unique, data-intensive supercomputer recently introduced by SDSC and which ranks among the 50 fastest supercomputers in the world. Most recent research projects have been focused on mining large scale smart grid data. She has presented at numerous invited presentations, conferences and meetings in the area of Big Data, smart grid and sustainability. Most recently she has been recognized at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy: Data to Knowledge to Action: Building New Partnerships’ launch partner recognition for the Sustainable Communities – Smart San Diego project. Dr. Balac has recently founded and serves at the President and CEO of the Data Insight Discovery. Inc., assisting business discover valuable insight from the vast amount of data.
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