Sessions at Strata Summit 2011 on Wednesday 21st September

A central story of the web is how ubiquitous high-speed communication lowered the cost of group creation and led to things we now call web 2.0 and the social web. There is an analogous story happening in data science. The dual innovations of Hadoop and elastic utility computing have dramatically changed the economics of data processing. The impact of these changes will be as profound; we will be grappling with them for many years to come. This talk explores these changes through the lens of several case studies of big data inside Amazon. Join us for a peek inside the unfolding data revolution.

This session is sponsored by Amazon Web Services

Big data analytics is where advanced analytic techniques operate on top of big data sources. Attend this customer session for a brief introduction to EMC Greenplum’s Big Data Analytics platform. Then hear how customers from consumer Internet, financial services and energy are using EMC’s solutions to harness big data for real business advantage – getting closer to their customers, detecting fraud, and turning click stream analysis into a revenue generating stream.

This session is sponsored by EMC Greenplum

This session sponsored by Aster Data

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:

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 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:

• a stream-based aggregation and processing service, built on top of the Kafka messaging system
• a distributed, in-memory OLAP store, hosted on Amazon’s web services, that can scan and aggregate over one billion rows per second
• 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.

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.