Strata Conference

Mark Madsen - The Mythology of Big Data

Can you recall what it feels like when an opportunity is exploding, right in front of you? Like the gold rush in the United States in the 1800's, big data appears to be peaking right now. It certainly has gotten a lot of attention lately, but Mark Masden places it in context in this keynote address. Big data is just another phase of computer science and our use of computers to model, capture, and analyze business processes. Mark emphasizes that we avoid collecting data without a clear vision for its potential.
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Werner Vogels - Data Without Limits

Did you know California's entire research network of educational institutions, kindergarten through college, now empties directly into Amazon's cloud storage system? From data generated by thousands of Web 2.0 companies every second to terabytes of data generated by government at every level; this may be the golden age of data set collection. In this presentation Werner Vogels defines Big Data, examines the challenges that big data creates, and invites everyone to consider the types of innovation necessary to handle them.
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Hilary Mason - What Data Tells Us

We are sharing more than ever. We're sharing so much that we're struggling to understand what to do with the data. We've become data rich, but information poor. It is estimated that we're sharing more than five exabytes of data every two days; roughly the same amount of online data that the world generated until 2003. In this keynote address Hilary Mason introduces some of the challenges of the new age of the exabyte. She offers what she sees as the opportunity to make the world a better place, by converting data into information.
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Designing for Human Sensors, Not Human Barcodes

"Right now we are in a shooting war between users and the analytics people, except the users aren't armed." Cory Doctorow argues that users and Internet companies are performing a transaction. A transaction where users give personal information in return for use of products or services. The transaction right now is lop-sided and unfair. To balance the transaction, Cory offers some suggestions.
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