O’Reilly Strata London - part 1 #

A few weeks ago I attended O’Reilly Strata EU. As I had the honour of being on the program committee I remember how hard it was to decide on which talks to accept and which ones to decline. It’s great to see that potential turned into an awesome conference on all things Big Data.

I arrived a bit late as I flew in only Monday morning. So I didn’t get to see all of the keynotes and plunged right into Dyson’s talk on the history of computing from Alan Turing to now including the everlasting goal of making computers more like humans, making them what is generally called intelligent.

The next keynote was co-presented by the Guardian and Google on the Guardian big data blog. Guardian is very well known for their innovative approach to journalism that more and more relies on being able to make sense of ever growing datasets – both public and not-yet-published. It was quite interesting to see them use technologies like Google Refine for cleaning up data, see them mention common tools like Google spreadsheets or Tableau for data presentation and learn more on how they enrich data by joining it with publicly available datasets.