Strata Summit 2011 Schedule

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McKinsey’s influential Big Data report has helped define and explain the opportunity created by the torrent of data flowing daily through business. Michael Chui outlines the big picture of data innovation, challenges and competitive advantage.

How does one take thousands of data domains, and tens of thousands of models and algorithms, and make it so that anyone can get answers to their natural language questions?

Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica, will describe how this works in Wolfram|Alpha and what the paradigm of computational knowledge is now making possible.

When it comes to big data insights, how do you know you’re asking the right questions? Hiring data scientists is a good start – we’re seeing their growth both on LinkedIn and at LinkedIn. But even data scientists are not immune from the myriad of hidden pitfalls that keep your key insights out of sight.

Drawing from a deceptively simple exercise that I’ve used to haze dozens of data scientists on their first day, I will discuss the good, the bad and the ugly lessons we’ve learned about asking the right questions, denominators and being a data skeptic.

O’Reilly Media’s Julie Steele showcases the finalists and Best in Show winner from the Strata Vizathlon, a data visualization contest produced in partnership with Juice Analytics. (Note: the contest has already closed).

By using social media metrics, TV networks can now get ratings for their programs in real time.

HPCC Systems from LexisNexis® Risk Solutions offers a proven, data-intensive supercomputing platform designed for the enterprise to solve big data problems. HPCC Systems offers a consistent data-centric programming language, two processing platforms and a single architecture for efficient processing. Customers, such as financial institutions, insurance carriers, insurance companies, law enforcement agencies, federal government and other enterprise-class organizations leverage the HPCC Systems technology through LexisNexis® products and services.

This keynote is sponsored by LexisNexis

People correctly assume that in order to profit from big data, you have to acquire the data. We look at some cases of profiting from exploiting innovative ways of acquiring data.

The time has come for policymakers to begin using innovative technologies to analyze data exhaust, in order to protect communities from multiple slow-onset crises that threaten to reverse hard-won progress in human development.

Personal data is a an exploding asset class that is currently not being leveraged to inform public policy decisions or mitigate risk. This panel, sponsored by United Nations Global Pulse, will examine the value of private sector data and consider some of the challenges inherent its use.

Aneesh Chopra, the US Federal Chief Technology Officer, and deputy CTO Chris Vein, in conversation with Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media.

As they saying goes, “If you’re not paying for a product, then you’re the product.” But the world is a better place when human beings are enlisted as sensors—as distributed mechanisms for mapping, understanding, and connecting the world and the data it generates—and not treated as barcodes, mere bits of data to be read, logged and analyzed.

This is a huge blind-spot in contemporary network service design, abetted by our own inability to correctly price privacy disclosures. There are tools, services—and yes, even analytics—waiting to be invented and productized which will make our services into something better than Skinner boxes that train us to undervalue our data and our privacy.

This keynote is sponsored by GE. More information coming soon.

Data increasingly drives news reporting, and the Guardian has been at the front of this change. Simon Rogers, editor of the Guardian’s award-winning Datablog, will talk about how data is directing its coverage.

As the world of data expands, the challenge of understanding it expands as well. Narrative Science is addressing this challenge with a software platform that uses data to drive the generation of compelling narratives that tell the stories contained within it. The technology tells the stories that are hidden in the numbers.

There’s never been a better time to reconsider transparency and talk about strategic leaking. In this talk, Michael Nelson—whose career has taken him from the White House to the boardrooms of the Fortune 500—looks at the naked corporation and what information can do when it flows intentionally between companies and their ecosystems.

His new report for the CSC Leading Edge Forum Research examines how radical transparency can be a powerful business tool, with companies sharing the previously unthinkable—salary, pricing, project roadmaps, and more.

Disruptive technology shapes the world, defining political, military, financial, and commercial opportunities and threats. Whether originating in academic research, in National Labs, or in privately held or public companies, these technologies can emerge with explosive impact, creating and destroying value. Yet there are few tools to track these innovations—at a global scale and at a pace that keeps up with the rate of change.

What if corporate strategists could literally draw a map to find growth opportunities? A technique called semantic clustering analysis makes this possible. When applied to technology entities worldwide, this analysis can reveal not only which innovation areas are thick with competition, but also where in the market there are opportunities, or “white spaces,” ripe for innovation. The result is a data-driven visual tool that can be used to drive corporate innovation strategy.

The data age is having a radical effect on investigative journalism. Reporters need to know how to find stories in data and social media. What are the opportunities in data for journalists, and what does the investigative reporter of tomorrow look like?

Under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s leadership, New York City government has demonstrated an unyielding commitment to transparency and accountability. Today, that commitment is manifested in the next phase of the open government movement. This keynote will discuss the City of New York’s role in shaping the evolving data paradigm nationally, and highlight ways the City is making data more readily available and easily shared to improve its service delivery and increase accountability for its performance.

Big Data can become an unmanageable business burden if you’re not careful. As your company’s analytics initiatives rapidly grow, you’re going to max out your IT budget if you don’t keep the data as compact, compressed, and storage-efficient as possible. Just as critical, your users will find all the information far too massive to wade through if you don’t deliver targeted subsets to their tablets, smartphones, and other devices for speedy consumption. In this session, Forrester senior analyst James Kobielus will help you understand how to keep your company’s data as small and nimble as practical while scaling it out into the petabytes.

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Too often analytics are seen as a black box by executives. JC Herz explores how to demystify the process and make analytics business-driven vs. technology-driven.

As organizations take charge of their data—on their networks or in the cloud—the role of the CIO is changing. This panel will discuss how the shifts in the kind of business intelligence they are able and asked to provide, and shifts in the tempo of those activities, are changing their organizational role.

Keynote by Paul DePodesta, The New York Mets VP of Player Development and Scouting, Entrepreneur & Subject of Moneyball.

A critical look at the day’s proceedings

Join us in the immediately following sessions at Strata Summit. Have a drink and some delectable nibbles, network with other Summit attendees, and visit our Sponsors who are leading the charge in the data revolution.

O’Reilly invites you to our Strata New York celebration. Join us to kick-off a week of activities with a festive evening of creative cuisine, signature drinks, and the sharing of innovative ideas in our visualization showcase.

RSVP is required. If you plan to join us, please RSVP here.

The goal is to tell a story about the state of the art of visualization, the boundaries that it pushes (and isn’t pushing yet), the lessons learned from things gone wrong, and how to think about and intelligently interact with data in visual form.

• Amanda Cox
• Richard Brath
• Andrew Gelman
• Noah Ilinksy
• Coco Krumme
• Lev Manovich
• Irene Ros
• Ligorano/Reese
• Jer Thorp

It all happens at the Eyebeam, a cutting-edge art and technology center in Chelsea.

When: Tuesday, Sept. 20 (7:00pm-10:00pm)

Where: EYEBEAM
540 W. 21st Street, (between 10th and 11th Avenues)
New York, NY

Tel: 212.937.6580; Fax: 212.937.6582

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One of the most technology- and data-savvy members of Congress, and co-sponsors of the DATA (Data Accountability and Transparency Act) bill, talks about his vision for making Federal Government spending data open, accessible and transparent.

Are 80 year old measures of the economy still useful, and can the age of big data offer us better indicators against which to benchmark economic performance?

The first three of the five startups that were selected as Launch Pad finalists will deliver their pitches.

• Datadog
• iChart
• Fanbridge

Coming off the worst financial crisis of our generation, an entire industry (and the global economy) is not just rebuilding the very foundations of a robust banking system, but also rethinking the ‘new normal’ for Banking. Data has rapidly emerged as a key lever for this reboot. Hear from some of the leading business practitioners in the industry:

1. How tectonic shifts driven by Big Data technologies, emerging Business Models, and Macro Socio-Economic conditions is unleashing an unprecedented redesign of the Global Financial System? and
2. Who are the emerging BIg Data players at the forefront of this shift?

What billions of credit card transactions can tell us about the nature of habits, patterns of human movement, and the structure of urban economies.

Digital media publishers sit astride torrents of data about their content, audiences and advertisers. Every day, the world’s two billion internet users visit millions of pages, and are exposed to more than one hundred billion online advertising impressions. Publishers of digital content need to crunch this data to predict who will visit tomorrow, and how to price the ads those visitors see.

In the past year, Metamarkets has developed a Big Data stack for the media markets, comprised of three pieces:

1. a stream-based aggregation and processing service, built on top of the Kafka messaging system
2. a distributed, in-memory OLAP store, hosted on Amazon’s web services, that can scan and aggregate over one billion rows per second
3. a real-time web console, served by node.js, with dynamic data visualizations powered by D3, the successor to Protovis.

   Our platform is in currently in production with three of the largest media publishers in Europe and United States.

The most important question to ask about big data is: what’s in it for my organization? Does it create net-new economic value, increase enterprise agility, improve collaboration, or enable new efficiencies? And if so, in which scenarios? What are the implications for people, process and technologies in any given organization?

In this keynote, Bill Cook, President of EMC Greenplum, will provide insight into today’s business opportunity with big data analytics and three key steps to consider as you begin your journey.

This keynote is sponsored by EMC Greenplum

Donald F. Donahue, President and CEO of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), and Paul Sforza, CTO of the US Treasury Department, will discuss America’s first public financial services data utility.

This project, led by Richard Berner and others working under the Office of Financial Research (OFR) provisions of the Dodd-Frank regulatory reform legislation, is being incorporated into our country’s existing information infrastructure to provide consistent, quality data to investors, institutions, and regulators.

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An interview with Bradley Horowitz, VP Product for Google+

This is not your father’s weather forecast. Businesses across the commercial spectrum can be positively and negatively affected by weather conditions in deep and sometimes unanticipated ways. Whether they are surprise acute weather events (ie., weather black swans) or prolonged patterns that slowly enhance or curtail product demand, it is hard to find an industry that does not have some sort of operational or financial exposure to the atmosphere.

Hear how companies in sectors ranging from banks managing commodity risk to home centers staging seasonal demand driven products are are analyzing weather in different ways to get ahead, and how they can tap into the unexploited possibilities of the treasure trove of government maintained weather data.

The remaining two of the five startups that were selected as Launch Pad finalists will deliver their pitches.

• Mineful
• Chart.io

Consumers are generating an immense amount of text-based data via social and other channels. That’s a treasure trove of insight IF we can can unlock intention, emotion and meaning. How well do computers do it today and what are some of the cutting-edge ways to improve accuracy in the near future?

Startups are in it to make money—whether by breaking even, being acquired, or finding some other exit. But for data-driven startups, turning bits into dollars can be a challenge. There are privacy issues, data ownership concerns, and questions about how to monetize the business. This panel of investors and entrepreneurs will look at strategies for generating money in data-driven startups.

Five startups will be selected to deliver their pitches to the Strata Summit audience, to be judged on Wednesday afternoon.

Even the biggest commercial datasets can’t rival those produced at CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider. As scientists research the conditions that created our universe, the volume of data captured is truly staggering.

We all need clean, useful, validated data—but most of us don’t have an easy way to gather it and the data we do have is messy. Over the last year I’ve spent my time hanging with crowds—crowds of tech savvy, mobile-device enabled modern day distributed workers who are changing the way we should think about acquiring and managing data. These workers can convert a Masterpiece like Moby Dick into an artful expression by translating it into emoji—or they can walk across the nation validating in-store beer pricing, product placement and restaurant times. Hear some of the numbers behind these crowds and how startups like Gigwalk are changing the way we work.

While businesses around the world struggle to understand the how to profit from the information revolution, one class of enterprise has successfully mastered the challenge—international organized crime. Globally crime groups are rapidly transforming themselves into consumers of big data. Lessons in how organized crime and terrorists are innovatively consuming both illegal and open source data will be presented.

At the same time as we’re seeing breakthrough after breakthrough in artificial intelligence, we’re also seeing the fulfillment of the vision of Vannevar Bush, JCR Licklider, and Doug Engelbart that computers could augment human information retrieval and problem solving. AI turned out not to be a matter of developing better algorithms, but of having enough data. The key applications of the web combine machine learning algorithms with techniques for harnessing the collective intelligence of users as captured in massive, interlinked cloud databases. Bit by bit, this is leading us towards a new kind of global brain, in which we have met the AI, and it is us. We and our devices are its senses, our databases are its memory, its habits, and even its dreams. This global brain is still a child, but as its parents, we have a responsibility to think about how best to raise it. What should we be teaching our future augmented selves? How can we make the emerging global consciousness not only more resilient, but more moral?

A look back over Strata Summit, and forward to the future of data.

Join us immediately following the sessions to celebrate two fantastic days of delving into the future of data – in business and beyond. Enjoy a beverage or two, and then join us for Ignite Strata immediately afterward!

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Would you pitch a project? Launch a web site? Teach a hack? We’ll find out this year at at the New York Edition of Ignite Strata.

Ignite Strata will happen at the NY Marriott Marquis on Wednesday, September 21 at 7:00pm, following the conclusion of Strata Summit.

Ignite Strata NY Speaker Lineup

• Alex Howard – “Fauxpen Data”
• Noah Ilinksy – “Data Viz: You’re Doin’ it Wrong”
• Leila Chirayath Janah (Title TBD)
• Justin Moore – “Predicting with foursquare Data”
• Coco Krumme – “Calorie Dense”
• Yale Fox – “Pulling Data Out of Life and Unlikely Situations”
• Janna Levin – “Astrobiology”
• Spencer Greenberg – “Reason vs. Emotion: Two Systems at War?”
• Andy Rossmeissl (Title TBD)