From the 2014 Strata + Hadoop World conference in New York City, an interview with the Vice-President of Strategy at Silicon Valley Data Science about the Data Lake dream, the avatars of the space, and the parallel between Hadoop and Linux.

Kenneth Cukier looks at what’s next for machine learning — and human knowledge.

Self-driving cars were just the start. What’s the future of big data-driven technology and design?

Deep Learning begins to derive significant value from Big Data. It has already radically improved the computer’s ability to recognize speech and identify objects in images, two fundamental hallmarks of human intelligence.

Moderator
Steve Jurvetson, Partner, DFJ Ventures

Panelists
Adam Berenzweig, Co-founder and CTO, Clarifai
Naveen Rao, Co-founder and CEO, Nervana Systems
Elliot Turner, Founder and CEO, AlchemyAPI
Ilya Sutskever, Research Scientist, Google Brain

Freiheit und Vorhersage: Über die ethischen Grenzen von Big Data – Big Data braucht Demut und Menschlichkeit.

Mayer-Schönberger stellt klar, dass Vorhersagen (predicitive analytics) durch Big Data selbstverständlich ein Risiko mindern und die Welt dadurch ein Stück weit einschätzbar wird. Doch es ist Vorsicht geboten wenn Vorhersagen drastische Konsequenzen haben können. Denn Vorhersagen sind nie perfekt, es sind nur Aussagen über eine Wahrscheinlichkeit. Aufgrund dessen darf nicht über Menschen gerichtet werden.

Auch und gerade deshalb fordert der Oxford-Professor das Recht auf Vergessenwerden im Internet sowie den Schutz menschlicher Handlungsfreiheit ein.

Cloud and Big Data – what’s next?! A discussion panel with JP Rangaswami (Chief Scientist, Salesforce.com), Florian Leibert (Founder, Mesosphere), Jean Paul Schmetz (Chief Scientist, Hubert Burda Media), Werner Vogels (CTO, amazon), Aditya Agarwal (Vice President of Engineering, Dropbox), and Sonali De Rycker (Partner, Accel Partners).

What people wants? It’s simplicity and convenience, JP said. Adoption of Cloud was driven by convenience not by economics. The change came from people. If they are able to use things easily it’s successful.

Werner nods and adds that we’re not only have and had to transform the business, we have to transform IT – this is all powered by the cloud. Companies can now move much faster than ever before. The Cloud is a step of revolution for him.
The biggest issue, especially in Germany, is security. Who has access and how save is the data? But customers are saying security improved when they moved to cloud, is Werner’s experience.

“Cloud unleashed the power of entrepreneurship low costs for starting companies”

The cloud made it easier to set up software things and security is today no problem. Trusting Google, Dropbox or other services isn’t such a big thing, but who knows what will happen in 15 years? It’s not just for fun companies move to cloud, it should be biz reason (ROI).

“Analog commoditization stays. Digital commodities change…You still need to innovate and adapt.” (JP Rangaswami)
But what’s the future?

It’s not the hardware you will make money on. It’s not the software anymore. But it’s rather the software. It’s a long process of reinvention to become a customer-centered company. And security…

“If we assume most of critical data will reside in a cloud then code should move where the data is.”

Critical data is being stored in the cloud – data that is worth protecting! If someone breaks into your house you do not need more laws, you need a better lock, says Werner – that’s what we try to do. So, in 3-5 years everything will be encrypted. A huge industry might appear.

It will be intereting to learn about the Big Data aproach of major magazine media. The conference is a platform created by FIPP and VDZ, two major magazine media trade organizations. During the two day conference there will be two talks on Big Data.

• Jean-Paul Schmetz (Chief Scientist, Hubert Burda Media) will have a talk on Big Data in B2C Publishing.

• Michael Dell (Senior Vice President, IHS / Managing Director, IHS Jane’s, IHS) will have a talk on Big Data in B2B Publishing.

Yesterday in Munich IBM held its first SmartCamp event in Germany. It was also the first SmartCamp with a specific focus on Big Data and Business Analytics.

Keynote Speaker Philippe Souidi, Founder of echofy.me, summarized this topic perfectly when he called Big Data the “Oil of the next Century”… fitting, isn’t it?

The Gate Garching, the host of the event and a Munich Technology and Entrepreneur Center, was the perfect location for mindshare around the next generation of cutting edge startups, fitting because it is the home to several in-house innovative, young companies and close to the campus of the Technical University of Munich.

Let’s learn a little more about the startups who participated. 3 Big Data and Analytics startups received intensive mentoring from 15 Mentors representing different backgrounds, different industries, and different perspectives. Mentors included VCs, angels, serial entrepreneurs and industry experts, all of which had a common interest in Smarter Analytics.

SmartCamp Participants:

Celonis Softwate Solutions is the leading vendor for the analysis of operative process data created by IT systems. Their unique analysis technology, Process Business Intelligence, enables customers to intuitively dive into their process data and use it to improve their operational performance.

HoneyTracks provides the deepest analytics solution for monetization of online games and help Game Companies to understand the success factors of their game and how it generates revenues based on big data.

JouleX Energy Manager Solutions reduces energy costs up to 60% by monitoring, analyzing and managing energy usage of all network-connected devices and systems, without the use of costly and unwieldy agents.

And the winner is… JouleX!

As expected we had some very strong teams however the judges selected Joulex as the winner. Joulex leverages big data in order to create business intelligence by aggregating and correlating the energy information from all IP-enabled devices to provide unprecedented visibility into the energy consumption and utilization of those devices throughout the distributed office, data center and facilities environments. JouleX takes this a step further by applying advanced analytics to identify energy, cost, and carbon savings opportunities and a management platform to implement policies to realize this savings.

They have offices in Germany, US and Japan and are headed by Tom Noonan – Tom was previously CEO of Internet Security Systems (ISS), which was acquired by IBM for $1.5 billion. We look forward to working with them in the coming months.

Congratulations again to Joulex, Celonis and Honeytracks, an impressive set of Analytics and Big Data startups to kick off the very first SmartCamp in Germany!

Also a very big thanks to all our partners who were key to a very successful event.

Read more on: IBM Smart Camp

Peter Voss Datameer from newthinking on Vimeo.

Peter Voss Datameer from newthinking on Vimeo.

Peter Voss is CTO at Datameer with extensive experience in software engineering and architecture of large-scale data processing. His focus has been largely on UNIX based enterprise systems with extensive background in Java, Spring, Hadoop, Lucene and Eclipse plug-in development.

Prior to Datameer, Peter consulted on a number of big data business intelligence projects with companies such as EMI Music and Krugle. Earlier, he was architect and developer for Deutsche Post and their ePost project, a distributed production system that processed more than 1 billion letters per year. Peter studied biology and has a Diplom (i.e., a Masters) in biochemistry and bioinformatics from the University of Köln.

Recorded at berlin buzzwords 2012.
More at berlinbuzzwords.de

Produzed by Alexander Oelling and Philippe Souidi.

Nicolas Spiegelberg – Multi-tenant HBase Solutions at Facebook from newthinking on Vimeo.

Facebook first started looking for a distributed OLTP database solution in 2010. We ultimately chose HBase as the best solution for a variety of our workloads. Since then, we have rolled out multiple large production systems using HBase. For example, our current Messages infrastructure runs on HBase and handles over 180 billion person-to-person messages per month. This talk will discuss multiple Facebook projects that are running on HBase now, our selection criteria in choosing HBase as a good fit, and the functionality we added to open source to optimize a growing variety of use cases.

More info: berlinbuzzwords.de/sessions/multi-tenant-hbase-solutions-facebook