Jun 1, 2018   SOURCE: BusinessWire

Valassis Digital Engineer Recognized for Computer Science Contributions

Valassis Digital, a leading digital marketing intelligence company, announced that Peter Parente, Principal Software Engineer, has been recognized for his contributions on Project Jupyter, as a recipient of the prestigious technical Software System Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). The award is presented to an institution or individual(s) recognized for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts in commercial acceptance, or both.

Project Jupyter, an open source project developed to solve the costly industry challenge of publishing and sharing research, provides a solution to enable data scientists to collaborate and reproduce results. The project has been recognized for making significant contributions that have had far-reaching impact on the ascendance of computing as an integral part of how we live and work today. It also opens promising new avenues for research exploration and commercial application. The solution is used by more than 130 employees at Valassis Digital, enabling data scientists to collaborate.

“Valassis Digital continues to grow and innovate and thought leaders like Peter are helping to pave the way,” said Cali Tran, President, Valassis Digital. “We are proud to see him recognized for his contributions at Valassis and to the broader computer science community. We take great pride in employing the best of the best – keeping us on the cutting edge of digital transformation.”

Jupyter continues to gain industry-wide adoption. Since 2015, Jupyter-based products have been released by several companies including Google (Cloud DataLab), Microsoft (AzureML, HDInsight), Intel (Trusted Analytics Platform) and IBM (IBM Watson Studio). Bloomberg and Anaconda Inc. have partnered with Project Jupyter to develop the next-generation web interface, JupyterLab.

“It's been great working in the Jupyter community over the years, learning so much from other contributors as well as users who share their analytics use cases and technical challenges,” Parente said. “The experience has definitely paid off in how I'm able to contribute, both here at Valassis and externally.”

The original Project Jupyter Steering Council, led by Fernando Perez and Brian Granger, included Min Ragan-Kelley, Paul Ivanov, Thomas Kluyver, Jason Grout, Matthias Bussonnier, Damian Avila, Steven Silvester, Jonathan Frederic, Kyle Kelley, Jessica Hamrick, Carol Willing, Sylvain Corlay and Peter Parente. The 2017 recipients will be formally honored at the ACM Awards Banquet on June 23 in San Francisco.

About Valassis Digital

Valassis Digital is a leading digital marketing intelligence company, providing a best-in-class data management platform and online and offline targeting capabilities that fuels superior display advertising and expanded media offerings, such as in-store campaign solutions, for advertising clients. Through proprietary technology, Valassis Digital creates meaningful marketing and advertising impact for businesses – from planning, delivery, and attribution. Valassis Digital taps into meaningful, actionable insights that drive better campaign performance.

About Valassis

Valassis helps thousands of local and national brands tap the potential of industry-leading data through intelligent media delivery – understanding, engaging and inspiring millions of consumers to action with smarter cross-channel campaigns. We’ve been a part of consumers’ lives for decades, introducing new ways to deliver offers and messages that activate them — whether via mail, digital, in-store or the newspaper. NCH Marketing Services, Inc. and Clipper Magazine are Valassis subsidiaries, and RetailMeNot Everyday™ is its consumer brand. Its signature Have You Seen Me?® program delivers hope to missing children and their families. Valassis and RetailMeNot are wholly owned subsidiaries of Harland Clarke Holdings.