Dan McCreary

Biography

Dan McCreary is a Distinguished Engineer working for the Optum Advanced Technology Collaborative. He helps businesses within UnitedHealthGroup (Fortune 6) evaluate advanced technologies including AI, Graph and NoSQL. Dan has a background in solution architecture, search, machine learning, and NLP. He is the co-author of the book “Making Sense of NoSQL” and was the co-founder of the Dataversity NoSQL Now! Series of conferences. His current research is helping organizations evaluate the cost-effectiveness of migrating from relational to graph databases. In the past, Dan worked for Steve Jobs as NeXT computer and Bell Labs as an integrated circuit designer.

Talks and Events

2022 Workshop: Graph Systems Thinking

These will be detailed stories of how teams have used systems thinking to promote graph adoption.We will dive into advanced topics such as graph-based machine learning, cognitive bias and storytelling to promote good systems thinking best practices.

2021 Talk: Graph Hardware Is Coming!

In this presentation, we will show how current general-purpose CPU hardware fails to deliver high-performance graph analytics. We show that by doing a detailed analysis of the actual hardware functionally needed by graph queries (pointer jumping), we can redesign hardware that is optimized for fast graph traversal. We will also show how by combining graph and machine learning that an entirely new generation of “sparse matrix” processing will move large enterprise graphs to an entirely new level of capabilities. We combine an innovative use of graphics, metaphors and storytelling to help even non-technical staff understand and remember these concepts.