Speakers

Keynote Speaker:

Nate Silver, Author and Founder of FiveThirtyEight.com

Nate Silver, “spreadsheet psychic” and “number-crunching prodigy,” is an American statistician, journalist and writer.

Nate first gained public recognition for inventing PECOTA, a system for forecasting the performance and career development of Major League Baseball players, but during the 2008 presidential election primaries, he focused his amazing predictive abilities and forecasting models to the game of politics and current events — with incredible results.

His predictions of the 2008 primary election results had stunning accuracy, and were often in opposition to the better-known political pollsters. He then set his sights on the outcome of the general election, where he correctly predicted the presidential winner in 49 states and the District of Columbia.

Nate’s award winning political website is FiveThirtyEight.com – a name that comes from the total number of votes in the electoral college. On the website, he crunches data, statistical studies, polls, election results, demographics, and voting patterns to publish a running forecast of a wide variety of current events, including the UK elections, the US midterm elections, health care passage and immigration issues.

The accuracy of Nate’s predictions has brought him acclaim throughout the world. In 2009 he was honored as “One of the World’s 100 Most Influential People” by Time and selected as one of the “Rolling Stone 100: Agents of Change” by Rolling Stone.

Nate is a prolific writer and has co-authored a series of books that unlock the secret of baseball through statistical analysis and forecasting. He has contributed to ESPN.com, Sports Illustrated and New York Times, and has had his work reported in Newsweek, Huffington Post, Vanity Fair and other publications.