Schedule: Keynote sessions

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.

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.

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.

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

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 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

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?