Sessions at Strata Summit 2011 on Tuesday 20th September

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.

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