Keynotes: Strata Conference in London 2012

Alasdair Allan is the author of Learning iOS Programming, Programming iOS Sensors, Basic Sensors in iOS, Geolocation in iOS, iOS Sensor Apps and Arduino and Augmented Reality in iOS. Last year he and Pete Warden caused a privacy scandal by uncovering that your iPhone was recording your location, all the time. This caused several class action lawsuits and a U.S. Senate hearing. He isn’t sure what to think about that. From time to time he stands in front of cameras, and you can often find him at conferences run by O’Reilly Media.

He runs a small technology consulting business writing bespoke software, building open hardware and providing training, including a series of workshops on sensors. He sporadically writes blog posts about... Read More.

As the VP Business Development for Teradata in EMEA Mikael Bisgaard-Bohr is responsible for identifying new trends and directions in the market for BI, Analytics and Big Data. He interacts with the largest and most sophisticated users of Teradata’s technology as well as leading minds in the industry to gain a better understanding for how technology is changing how organisations are run, products consumed and how organisations and consumers interact in the future. He frequently shares that insight with Teradata customers and prospects as well as at leading conferences across the EMEA region. Mikael has been working with BI for the last 18 years and prior to his current role he was a thought leader and business consultant focused on the retail industry.... Read More.

Kenneth Neil Cukier the data editor of the The Economist, and co-author of “Big Data: A Revolution that Will Transform How We Work, Live and Think” to appear in early 2013. Previously, he was the paper’s Tokyo correspondent and before that, its technology correspondent in London. From 2002 to 2004 Mr. Cukier was a research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, where he worked on the Internet and international relations. Additionally, Mr. Cukier serves on the board of directors of International Bridges to Justice, a Geneva-based NGO promoting legal rights in developing countries.

Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino is an interaction designer & entrepreneur. She is the founder of Good Night Lamp, a family of internet-connected lamps. She also leads Designswarm an “internet of things” design studio & consultancy and works with clients who want to design next generation connected products. She also uses her expertise to help shape early business ideas around smart products. Her work has been exhibited at The Victoria & Albert Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From 2007 to 2010, she co-founded and ran Tinker London, a smart product design studio. Focused on creating connected product experiences that linked the digital to the physical, Tinker was the first distributor of the Arduino platform in the UK, ran workshops around... Read More.

Edd Dumbill is a technologist, writer and programmer based in California. He is the program chair for the O’Reilly Strata and Open Source Convention Conferences, and Editor in Chief of the journal Big Data.

He was the founder and creator of the Expectnation conference management system, and a co-founder of the Pharmalicensing.com online intellectual property exchange.

A veteran of open source, Edd has contributed to various projects, such as Debian and GNOME, and created the DOAP Vocabulary for describing software projects.

Edd has written four books, including O’Reilly’s “Learning Rails”. He writes regularly on Google+ and on his blog at eddology.com.

George Dyson is a historian of technology whose interests have included the development (and redevelopment) of the Aleut kayak (Baidarka, 1986), the evolution of digital computing and telecommunications (Darwin Among the Machines, 1997), and a path not taken into space (Project Orion, 2002). His latest book, Turing’s Cathedral: The origins of the digital universe, illuminates the transition from numbers that mean things to numbers that do things in the aftermath of World War II.

Ben is a best-selling author, broadcaster, medical doctor and academic who specialises in unpicking dodgy scientific claims from drug companies, newspapers, government reports, PR people and quacks. Unpicking bad science is the best way to explain good science.

Bad Science (4th Estate) has sold over 400,000 copies, is published in 18 countries, and reached #1 in the UK paperback non-fiction charts. His book exposing bad behaviour in the pharmaceutical industry will be published in 2012 by 4th Estate.

Ben has written the weekly Bad Science Column in the Guardian since 2003. It’s archived on this site along with blogposts, columns for the British Medical Journal, and other writing.

There are lots of clips of Ben on telly here, and a talk at... Read More.

John Graham-Cumming is computer programmer and author. He studied mathematics and computation at Oxford and stayed for a doctorate in computer security. As a programmer he has worked in Silicon Valley and New York, the UK, Germany and France. His open source POPFile program won a Jolt Productivity Award in 2004.

He is the author of a travel book for scientists published in 2009 called The Geek Atlas and has written articles for The Times, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, New Scientist and other publications.

He can be found on the web at jgc.org and on Twitter as @jgrahamc.

If you’ve heard of him at all, it’s likely because in 2009 he successfully petitioned the British Government to apologize for the... Read More.

Kathryn Hurley recently joined Google as a Developer Programs Engineer for Fusion Tables. In this role, she helps spread the word about Fusion Tables by presenting at conferences and developer events. She recently worked on Google’s 2010 U.S. Election Ratings gadget. She received an MS in Web Science from the University of San Francisco and a BS in Genetics from the University of California, Davis. Prior work experience includes research in mobile and peer-to-peer computing.

Mark spent the past two decades working on analysis and decision support projects in many industries. He is the founder of Third Nature, a research and consulting firm focused on emerging technology and practices in analytics, BI and information management. Mark is also an award-winning former CTO and consultant who frequently speaks at US and European conferences.

I focus on two types of work: using data to make decisions and manage organizations, and building data technology infrastructure. I’ve spent the past two decades working on analysis, performance management and decision support projects. A big part of making decisions and using data in a corporate setting is ensuring that the right data capture and data delivery infrastructure is in place to manage the business. As... Read More.

Liam Maxwell is the Executive Director of the IT Reform Group in the Cabinet Office and was appointed the Deputy Government Chief Information Officer (CIO) in April 2012.

His team is responsible for the delivery of the Government IT Strategy and Technical Leadership across government. He leads the spend control process for IT which is part of the Efficiency and Reform Group programme to save multiple billions across government.

Previously, Liam was Lead Member for Policy at the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead where his brief covered IT, sustainability and the council’s role as a “government lab” where he introduced innovative policies at the heart of the Big Society agenda and delivered the lowest council tax in Britain outside London.

As well as academic... Read More.

Jake Porway is a machine learning and technology enthusiast who loves nothing more than seeing good values in data. He is the founder and executive director of DataKind, an organization that brings together leading data scientists with high impact social organizations to better collect, analyze, and visualize data in the service of humanity. Jake was most recently the data scientist in the New York Times R&D lab and remains an active member of the data science community, bringing his technical experience from his past work with groups like NASA, DARPA, Google, and Bell Labs to bear on the social sector. Jake’s work has been featured in leading academic journals and conferences (PAMI, ICCV), the Guardian, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, and he has... Read More.

Kim Rees is a founding partner of Periscopic: http://www.periscopic.com, an award-winning information visualization firm. Their work has been featured in the MoMA as well as several online and print publications, including CommArts’ Interactive Annual, The Information Design Sourcebook, Print magazine, and numerous websites, blogs, and regional media outlets. Periscopic’s body of work was nominated for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards.

Kim is a prominent individual in the information visualization community. She has published papers in Parsons Journal of Information Mapping, was an award winner in the VAST 2010 Challenge, and is an advisor to the Congressional Budget Office. Kim has presented at several industry events including Strata, Wolfram Data Summit, Eyeo, VisWeek, and various data visualization groups among others. Recently she has also been... Read More.

Simon Rogers is editor of the Guardian’s Datablog and Datastore, an online data resource which publishes hundreds of raw datasets and encourages its users to visualise and analyse them. He is the author of Facts are sacred: the power of data available now on Kindle. Simon is also a news editor on the Guardian, working with the graphics team to visualise and interpret huge datasets. He was closely involved in the Guardian’s exercise to crowdsource 450,000 MP expenses records and the organisation’s coverage of the Afghanistan Wikileaks war logs. Previously he was the launch editor of the Guardian’s online news service and has edited the paper’s science section. He has edited two Guardian books: How Slow Can You Waterski and The Hutton Inquiry... Read More.

Jeni Tennison is the Technical Director of the Open Data Institute. As a developer, she specialises in open data publishing and consumption, including XML, JSON and linked data APIs. She trained as a knowledge engineer, gaining a PhD in collaborative ontology development. Jeni was the technical architect and lead developer for legislation.gov.uk and worked on the linked data aspects of data.gov.uk. She is author of several technical books and was appointed to the W3C’s Technical Architecture Group in 2011. She is also a member of the Open Data User Group and of the UK Government Linked Data Group.

Kaitlin comes from Digital Science, a new technology company started out of Macmillan Publishers, providing tools for researchers. She’s a technologist, open science advocate, and data nerd who works in her day job to make scientific research more efficient through better use of technology. Prior to moving to the UK to work for Digital Science, she managed the science division of Creative Commons where she worked to enable better knowledge sharing and research. She is also the external co-chair for Strata Conference in London, taking place October 1-2. For more about Digital Science, visit http://digital-science.com. You can follow her at @kaythaney.