Data Philly Tech Talks in Wharton

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📢 Join DataPhilly for our September Tech Talks: an evening of expert-led presentations, hands-on conversation, and networking with Philadelphia's data community. Our host is The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. https://www.wharton.upenn.edu/ **Schedule** * 6:00 – 6:30 PM: Networking * 6:30 – 7:15 PM: Vijay Subramanian: *Metric Trees: A Computable Representation for Analytics Systems* * 7:15 – 7:20 PM: Break * 7:20 – 8:05 PM: Aryan Thakur: *Field Notes: AI in the Lab* * 8:05 – 8:30 PM: Networking **🎤 Speaker 1: Vijay Subramanian** *Metric Trees: A Computable Representation for Analytics Systems* Modern data platforms and dashboard tools excel at computing metrics, but they do little to represent how those metrics relate to one another. This talk introduces metric trees — a graph-based representation that models KPI dependencies, decompositions, dimensions, and business equations as a computable structure. We'll explore how this representation enables analysis automation, and why, as AI becomes central to analytics, the next generation of analytics systems will depend less on dashboards or ever-larger ad hoc prompts and more on structured representations that AI can reason over reliably. *Bio:* Vijay Subramanian is the founder and CEO of [Trace](http://hellotrace.io/), an AI-powered analytics platform rethinking how companies understand and act on business performance. Previously, he spent nearly a decade at Rent the Runway as Chief Analytics Officer and Head of Growth, where he led data, growth, product, and operations through a period of rapid scale. He holds a PhD from Purdue University and began his career leading data science at one of the early startups applying machine learning to retail and supply chain problems. **🎤 Speaker 2: Aryan Thakur** *Field Notes: AI in the Lab* How are researchers actually using AI? Drawing on conversations with heavy AI adopters in labs at Harvard, Stanford, and UChicago, this talk highlights strategies that are working — from agents that handle analysis "no grad student wants to do" to nightly literature bots. We'll also cover the mental models super-users are using to adapt to rapid model improvement, and what it's like building a science tool at an early-stage startup. *Bio:* Aryan is part of the founding team at Tuva, an AI-for-science startup based in NYC founded by two Stanford grads. Aryan received a full-ride to the University of Georgia through the Foundation Fellowship and graduated in 2025 with a bachelor's degree in genetics. After graduating, Aryan completed his master's degree at Tsinghua University through the Schwarzman Scholarship, studying global affairs and how AI is shaping Chinese scientific systems. ❗Please note, by RSVPing you agree to comply to our code of conduct - [https://github.com/DataPhilly/projects/blob/main/COC.md](https://github.com/DataPhilly/projects/blob/main/COC.md)