Strata SC 2014 Preview

Strata SC conference is coming up next week. It's one of the busiest times of the year around here… FWIW, I was on the program committee and read/reviewed every one of the proposals. All of them!! So I wanted to share some upcoming highlights of Strata for those who will be attending.

Beau Cronin and I will co-host the Hadoop and Beyond track throughout Strata conf. Please join us for an amazing line-up of talks.

Along with introducing many excellent speakers, I’ll be doing some talking too:

• tutorial: Big Data Workflows on Mesos Clusters
  Tue 2/11 1:30pm, Room 204 – along with Ben Hindman and Flo Leibert, we'll be teaching a 3 hour hands-on tutorial about Mesos, its APIs, its frameworks –guaranteed to be filled with awesome (SOLD OUT)
• meetup: Mesos BOFWed 2/12, noon, at Lunch Tables – lunch gathering with the Mesos developer community
• book signing: Enterprise Data Workflows with Cascading
  Wed 2/12, 5:35pm, O’Reilly Media booth – we generally have ~25 of the Cascading book to give away, with my personalized endorsement to you included… but please sign up early because these tend to go fast :)
• session: Apache Mesos as an SDK for Building Distributed Frameworks
  Thu 2/13, 2:20pm, GA Ballroom J – my session talk about using Mesos to build new distributed frameworks
• Office Hour with Paco Nathan
  Thu 2/13, 3:15pm, Table A – sign up for a 1:1 discussion with me… suggested topics include: building scalable, fault-tolerant data workflows atop Apache Mesos; Enterprise Data Workflows with Cascading; PMML, an open standard for migrating predictive models; or any questions that you have

• • •

Brian Grainger – a Physics prof at Cal Poly, in my hometown SLO – wrote an excellent guide to Python @ Strata 2014. Olivier Grisel, Wes McKinney, Peter Wang, and others will be presenting the latest in Python for Data Science, in what I am tempted to call "The Breakthrough Year of Python".

There are far too many other recommended talks to mention them all, but I wanted to try to point out a few top picks:

• Thorn in the Side of Big Data: Too Few Artists, Chris Re @Stanford
• Bedtime Stories: Learning from Sleep Data, Monica Rogati @Jawbone
• The Ocean’s Big Data Platform, André Karpištšenko @Marinexplore
• Probabilistic Programming: What, Why, How, and When, Beau Cronin @Salesforce
• Algebra for Scalable Analytics, Oscar Boykin @Twitter
• Leveraging Value from Open Data Through Collaboration, Peter Pirnejad @City of Palo Alto
• Neural Networks for Machine Perception, Ilya Sutskever @Google

In addition, here are several talks that I am eager to attend, and highly recommend checking out:

• Can We Make Big Data Management Easier?, Magda Balazinska @ U Washington
• Effective Data Science With Scalding, Vitaly Gordon @LinkedIn
• The Last Mile: Challenges and Opportunities in Data Tools, Wes McKinney @DataPad
• The Sidekick Pattern: Using Small Data to Increase the Value of Big Data, Abe Gong @Jawbone
• Querying Petabytes of Data in Seconds, Reynold Xin and Sameer Agarwal @AMPLab
• MLbase: Distributed Machine Learning Made Easy, Ameet Talwalkar and Evan Sparks @AMPLab
• Expressing Yourself in R, Hadley Wickham @Rice
• Superconductor: Scaling Charts with Design and GPUs, Leo Meyerovich @Graphistry

Apologies to any friends whom I've omitted! Just simply scanning the schedule is becoming an overwhelming experience.

Plus, we have some fantastic keynotes scheduled – some nearly worth the price of admission alone. Some must-see insights among those include:

• Crossing the Chasm: What’s New, What’s Not, Geoffrey Moore
• The Future Isn’t What it Used to Be, James Burke
• How Companies are Using Spark, and Where the Edge in Big Data Will Be, Matei Zaharia
• The Art of Good Practice, Rodney Mullen

Gosh, looking at the list… that's a lot of Berkeley representing there… as a Stanford person, um, well, yeah those are awesome talks! Berkeley has really been taking a lead in Big Data lately and the AMPLab in particular deserves immense credit.

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Then the following week, on Wed 2/18, 8:30am - 4:30pm, join me for a full-day Intro to Machine Learning workshop. This will be next door to the Strata location, at the Network Meeting Center, 5201 Great America Parkway #122, Santa Clara, CA 95054.

We will preview some material from my new book project, Just Enough Math – advanced math for business people, to understand how to leverage Machine Learning in high-ROI apps.

See you there!