The inaugural event of EMC Greenplum’s ‘Data Science Series’ took place last Wednesday (8 February) and the Big Data Insight Group was in attendance. The verdict: a resounding success.

Around 200 C-level and senior business and IT practitioners, all keen to get to grips with big data, filed in to Covent Garden’s Hospital Club for a day of insightful thought leadership presentations. With big data only just starting to rear its head into the boardroom of many organisations, the event was designed to help catalyse the attendees’ big data strategies.
EMC Greenplum, who delivers the next-generation in data warehousing and analytics, boasted a host of high profile speakers for the first event in its Data Science Series.

The morning got underway with a keynote presentation by Oxford-educated, mathematician extraordinaire Marcus du Sautoy. Marcus explained the odds behind matching lottery numbers (which did not make for favourable listening), how the Inland Revenue can identify patterns in supposedly ‘random’ numbers to expose fraudsters, and why chaos theory means that predicting weather can so often be a fruitless task. His overriding point was that we need a firm grasp on numbers coupled with an agile approach to analysing them if we are going to garner any meaningful benefits from them.

Sean Gourley, CTO of the company Quid who produce software to visualise data for decision makers in business, was next to take to the stage. “If we want peace, we must first understand war,” he began. His point, which ran throughout his presentation, was that if you wish to implement change then you must have true understanding of that which you wish to affect. Being able to understand data, trends and markets through complex data analytics is how he suggested we can go about this. Sean also presented some of his own work - a visualisation of the number of companies that were created in each specific industry sector in the last decade. The 3D, interactive graphic showed how different sectors, such as utilities, went through particularly prosperous periods while also highlighting the exact ways in which the recession stunted economic growth. It proved an engaging example of how data can be displayed so you can map trends and monitor progress in an accessible way.

EMC’s own Mark Sear was the third man to step up to the lectern. Mark stated that big data is not something for the future; it is something for the here and now. He proceeded to use case studies to support his claim including Black Swan, social media analysts, who described how it allows companies to create profiles of their target markets through customers’ social media accounts. He also offered the examples of 23andMe, who perform genetic analysis to predict potential health risks in your future, and athlete analysts Atlas, who can determine potential pitfalls in an athlete’s physical development, to illustrate how big data analytics is already making a major difference in the world around us.

After a break for a dose of caffeine and networking, there were further presentations by Professor Nigel Shadbolt of Southampton University and Steven Hillion, formerly at Greenplum and now of Alpine Data Labs. Nigel discussed the pros and cons of open data, something which, although not without difficulty and risk, could create a host of exciting benefits in bringing together data from various public sources. By releasing data concerning simple things like where all the bus stops are located in the UK, he explained, you open a range of opportunities for companies to perform analytics on such data to in turn improve the services and products they offer.

Steven, with the unenviable task of trying to maintain the audience’s attention with lunch looming, offered advice from his own experiences of trying to find a data scientist. A data scientist, he said, would ideally combine the knowledge and skills of five different roles – a business analyst, mathematician, a computer programmer, an artist to present the data, and a sleuth to tease information out of data. He suggested that physicists often come closest to ticking all these boxes as they can both code and relate data to real world environments but even these are hard to find. Nevertheless, despite its difficulties, Steven remained assured that this is not an impossible task, especially as courses specialising in producing data scientists are on the rise.

Following a hard-earned and much enjoyed lunch, the final presentations of the day commenced with Matt Bagwell, global creative director at EMC Consulting, who demonstrated the importance of visualisation to turn piles of numbers into valuable infographics to enrich your knowledge. By attaching a few gizmos to his bike, Matt explained how he can turn his commute to work into a digital map outlining his speed, heart rate and the efficiency of his route and track how this changes over time. This demonstrated how raw data can be visualised and contextualised to make it meaningful to the user. The challenge, he stressed, is for companies to adopt the same approach to get valuable insight from their data.

The day finished with a final keynote presentation by Peter Hinssen, lecturer at London Business School and manager and co-founder of management consultancy company Across. The crux of his presentation was that “information is the new oil”, which also the title of his latest book. Peter explained that we are only at the midway point of our journey to the digital age. We are in the ‘era of now’. The challenge we face is how quickly we can adapt to the information you can extract from your data. “It’s not about big data,” he said, “it’s about strategic intelligence and insight.”

With roadmapping big data projects hot on the to-do lists of companies across the country, the event proved to be an informative experience which demonstrated both how and why you need to make a start on big data before you get left behind.

For further big data events, including more of EMC’s Data Science Series, be sure to keep checking www.thecloudcircle.com.