Strata NYC Jumpstart 2011 wrap up

Today was the first day of Strata NYC 2011 which is a five day Big Data conference in New York. The first day of talks are the so called Jumpstart talks that deal with the issues of Big Data at a very high level. The down side for me on the high level talks is they lose the granularity and coolness of the more detailed analytics talks that I go to. Nonetheless they were good talks given by some very influential thought leaders in the field of analytics and Big Data. Here are some of the highlights:

Nolan Goldberg gave the first talk and potential buzz kill session of the day.  Nolan is a lawyer and gave a sweeping overview of the development of the law with respect to big data and privacy. Basically the law and the technical development pace has resulted in a moving target. Solutions that protected people's privacy only a short time ago are no longer capable of doing that. This poses problems for figuring out what is ok, and determining if your solution or application might have a legal problem. Also as the US, individual states and the EU try to address this issue the is no reason to believe they will do this in sync or even come up with a similar end solution. Kind of makes me feel like I am flying without a net, but at least Nolan was honest about it.

Cathy O'Neil, Hiten Shaw and DJ Patil gave talks about various requirements to hire, utilize and build cultures that are successful with data scientists. I loved their approaches to organizations. I do not care what industry you are in if you empower your people in a positive collaborative environment you will succeed.  Simple ideas, but here are three people who followed their own advise and were successful with it.

Simon Wardley gave a talk on the development process of an idea from new to a commodity. Hopefully I can use his thoughts to avoid following my next business from boom to commodity and death. That ride down sucks so I hope Simon's ideas help.

Michael Nelson give great talk on transparency of your data. I liked Mike's take on this. I really enjoyed the idea that we should start by thinking we should share all data instead of we need to protect all data. We have been so paranoid about this issue for so long maybe by starting with the counter argument we will achieve the righ balance.

Talks dealt with the importance of reputation and credibility online. Turns out that is more important today then ever before and a good Data Scientist can put a value on it ( something like 20%).

Overall a good day, although I can not wait until we take a deeper drive.