Sessions at SXSW Interactive 2011 about Data on Sunday 13th March

Over the past several years, there have been many discussions regarding how interactive technology can drive change in our nation’s politics – but of perhaps greater importance is how technology can improve the daily functioning of our nation’s government.

The discussion should not be a partisan one – this panel will bring together leading innovators from both parties to engage in a post-partisan discussion about how technology can improve the public’s interactions with their government.

This discussion should be about specifics – we can all agree on the broad principles that technology drives change – but we have all heard that conversation before. This panel will focus on the specific progress that has been made, the specific opportunities that exist in the near future, and the specific challenges that need to be addressed.

As citizens increasingly become on-demand consumers in their daily lives, it is clear that government needs to better utilize interactive technology or it will only be more radically disconnected from the public.

This is not a political conference, which is precisely why it should be where this conversation takes place – how can the innovations from the creative, marketing and interactive communities be applied to improving our nation?

Our government needs to modernize. We need to move forward and debate new ideas, focusing on how we can collectively make our government work smarter, faster and better for all citizens.

LEVEL: Intermediate

The Health 2.0 and Open Gov movements have helped unlock large repositories of data - from user-generated data in hundreds of online communities to mobile devices to federal quality indicators to medical record data within provider organizations. But much remains to be done to connect these disconnected islands of data to generate information that's meaningful and actionable by end users. And what happens when you link informed patient communities with their health data? As Clay Shirky says, it gets weird. And interesting.

A number of communities have cropped up to promote access to medical data and the integration of user-reported and behavioral data within the clinical decision stream including healthdatarights.org, #healthapps, #health2dev, #73cents, #getupandmove and #WhyPM. With the opening up of health datasets, platform APIs and increasingly sophisticated analytic engines to make user-generated health data clinically relevant, we can finally unleash the wider developer community to build robust and integrated tools to improve health and healthcare.

This session brings together some of the leading voices in the Health 2.0 movement to discuss and demo technologies that help access, mine, display and distribute control of health information across a wide variety of interfaces and devices. We will also hear how government is opening healthcare datasets for access by the developer community and how patients are increasingly becoming "n of 1" platforms.

LEVEL: Intermediate

With so much music available, finding new music that you like can
be like finding a needle in a haystack. We need new tools to help
us to explore the world of music, tools that can help us separate
the wheat from the chaff.

In this panel we will look at how visualizations can be used to
help people explore the music space and discover new, interesting
music that they will like. We will look at a wide range of
visualizations, from hand drawn artist maps, to highly interactive,
immersive 3D environments. We'll explore a number of different
visualization techniques including graphs, trees, maps, timelines
and flow diagrams and we'll examine different types of music data
that can contribute to a visualization.

Using numerous examples drawn from commercial and research systems
we'll show how visualizations are being used now to enhance music
discovery and we'll demonstrate some new visualization techniques
coming out of the labs that we'll find in tomorrow's music
discovery applications.

LEVEL: Advanced

Solr is an open source, Lucene based search platform originally developed by CNET and used by the likes of Netflix, Yelp, and StubHub which has been rapidly growing in popularity and features during the last few years. Learn how Solr can be used as a Not Only SQL (NoSQL) database along the lines of Cassandra, Memcached, and Redis.
NoSQL data stores are regularly described as non-relational, distributed, internet-scalable and are used at both Facebook and Digg.

This presentation will quickly cover the fundamentals of NoSQL data stores, the basics of Lucene, and what Solr brings to the table. Following that we will dive into the technical details of making Solr your primary query engine on large scale web applications, thus relegating your traditional relational database to little more than a simple key store.

Real solutions to problems like handling four billion requests per month will be presented. We'll talk about sizing and configuring the Solr instances to maintain rapid response times under heavy load. We'll show you how to change the schema on a live system with tens of millions of documents indexed while supporting real-time results. And finally, we'll answer your questions about ways to work around the lack of transactions in Solr and how you can do all of this in a highly available solution.

LEVEL: Advanced

Trading on news is not new. Terminals have had news readers attached from the time trading went electronic. What is new is who, or what, is trading on news. Born from a hybrid of technological capability, electronification of the markets, algorithmic trading, and a little influence from the intelligence community, black box trading systems are now applying semantic analysis to trade on news items without a single human ever reading the story. While only 2% of trading firms were doing this two years ago, roughly one-third are exploring it today. This session looks at the data, drivers, and technology behind trading on unstructured content.

LEVEL: Advanced

LEVEL: Intermediate

What is Cassandra? What is NoSQL? Why are sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google and Digg all using these new technologies? And what does that mean to me?

The popularity of the NoSQL movement has exploded in the last year or two, as a number of these non-traditional data storage systems have gone from experimental curiosities to powerful production-ready engines that power the largest real-time social networking sites on the Web.

Born out of Facebook, Cassandra is one of super-hot players in this new movement. We recently had an opportunity to build a new social networking site using it for the first time, and we want to share what we learned.

In this presentation:

• You will discover the NoSQL movement and the big players who lead it.
• You will learn both *how* and *why* you should build your site using Cassandra.
• You will understand what Cassandra offers, and how it differs from traditional databases as well as other NoSQL competitors like CouchDB and MongoDB.
• You will walk through real code examples that can help you bootstrap your own Cassandra project.
• You will see where we stumbled along the way, so you can avoid making the same mistakes.

Code samples are in Ruby on Rails.

LEVEL: Intermediate

We've been called "consumers" for decades, but we are also producers - of data. Lots of it. Everywhere we take our business, we leave a trail of data, little of which we manage, and almost none of which we control. Most of that data, however, is produced without our knowledge or control.

What happens when we take control of that activity? What happens when "the marketplace" is not a collection of customer fish in a sellers' barrel, but a truly open space where relationships are genuine, meaningful, and mutual?

This is the start of a revolution. The Shopping as a Revolutionary Act? panel will look at some of the leading developments involved, where they are likely to head, and what changes these will bring to our economic, social and personal lives.

LEVEL: Intermediate