President and CEO
Dr. Natasha Balac is the founder, CEO and president of Data Insight Discovery (DID). Concurrently, Natasha is directing the Interdisciplinary Center for Data Science (ICData) at UCSD’s Calit2/Qualcomm institute, and is a lecturer at UCSD’s Computer Science Department, the Rady School of Management and the UCSD Extension.
Natasha was with the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego from 2003 to 2016. While at SDSC, she founded and led the Predictive Analytics Center of Excellence (PACE). Other previous experience includes work on mining, analytics and bioinformatics in the biotech industry. She has also led multiple collaborations across a wide range of organizations and verticals in industry, government and academia. Natasha is well known and respected within the predictive analytics community for her presentations and contributions to numerous conferences and meetings in the areas of data mining and Big Data, as they relate to marketing, fraud detection and sustainability.
Natasha has over 25 years of experience applying predictive analytical techniques across a diverse range of applications, processes and industries. She founded Data Insight Discovery in 2014 to meet the growing need for data analytics services and education across all industries and application domains. Natasha has over 18 years of experience in instruction and curriculum development in the field of data analytics. Through her experience with the Rady School of Management, UCSD ‘s Computer Science Department and the UCSD Extension, she has developed a unique curriculum for data science. Her Data Mining 1 and Data Mining 2 courses at the UCSD Extension have been offered for over 13 years, and are consistently well subscribed. Natasha has conducted over 25 group training courses, all of which were comprised of individuals with a diverse background of skills and occupations. She is an experienced and dynamic public speaker, and has been invited to participate in a variety of panel discussions, conferences and colloquiums, e.g., she was the keynote speaker at ICCAD’s 2017 International Conference on Computer Aided Design. Natasha was an invited guest editor for the October 2017 issue of IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems.
As a result of her work with PACE in the field of data analytics, Natasha was invited to participate as a launch partner with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s “Data to Knowledge to Action: Building New Partnerships” initiative where she was recognized for her forward-thinking contributions to the Sustainable Communities – Smart San Diego project.
Dr. Balac holds a BS in Computer Science from Middle Tennessee State University, and a PhD in Computer Science from Vanderbilt University with an emphasis in 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.