Strata London Notes

Published by Filippo Diotalevi on 2nd October 2012 (last update 2nd October 2012)

A few useful (mostly for myself) notes after Strata London 2012.
As other people there noticed, quite a disappointing conference. Not just for the appalling location (note for organizers: hosting conferences in hotels is almost always a bad idea), but because all the topics of the conference felt, at least, three years old. Some of the things missing:

  • Graph databases, not a single mention
  • Real time analytics and machine learning: too little. Three related talks, no mentions to Storm and alternatives
  • No talks on R and related technologies?
  • Very little on data visualization (mostly driven by The Guardian and Tableau)
On the other side, too much of...
  • Hadoop everywhere! I do understand many of the sponsors were Hadoop "resellers", but so many talks?
  • Non technical talks.

Rant
I don't really know who started this trend of having non-technical, "cultural", "i will surprise you with my precious insights" kind of talks at technical conferences. I admit that at times it may be fun, even interesting, like when Bob Martin goes into details explaining how black holes work. However, isn't it boring when you see that happening at every single conference?
Do we really need three talks talking about Turing, Babbage and co, and what Big Data was like 50 years ago?

After the moanings, a list of the few discoveries that are worth a second look

Open Data and Open Government in UK

UK seems to be quite serious about opening up their data. Some examples:
Legislation.gov.uk offers the UK legislation, accessible via API and open to 3rd party applications
The Open Data Institute is the place to start to learn about the government Open Data policy

Pro Bono IT and Big Data

I have been looking for years (since I learnt about the inspiring JugAvis project) to find opportunities to connect charities and NGO with developers wanting to work pro-bono. Now DataKind proposes to do that. "Using data in the service of humanity" is their tagline. It's a US no-profit, but hopefully they'll expand their activities to UK soon.

I learnt that Google is producing tools for data analysis quicker than I can learn about

In no particular order

There's quite a lot of research going on around online (streaming) algorithms

... and it's not only limited to "summarizing" algorithms, but also to online machine learning.
Stream Lib implements some of them
Ted Dunning shares the details of a fast, large scale, k-means analysis