Alistair CrollKaitlin ThaneySimon WilliamsJacomo CorboNeal LathiaJohn Graham-Cumming

Data in Motion

Data moving people, movement making data.

Date: This event took place live on July 24 2012

Presented by: Alistair Croll, Kaitlin Thaney, Simon Williams, Jacomo Corbo, Neal Lathia, John Graham-Cumming

Duration: Approximately 60 minutes.

Cost: Free

Questions? Please send email to

Description:

With every step, every commute, every leap, we make data. From the diagnostics on a jet engine to the muscles of a top athlete, from the train we take to work to the way we track sports scores, data is in motion. In this Strata Online Conference, we'll look at data and movement across a variety of sports and industries.

Note: Includes access to the recorded session after the live event. This conference is being scheduled earlier so European data junkies can join in live, but will be recorded for West Coast audiences who don't want to wake up too early.

About Kaitlin Thaney

Kaitlin comes from Digital Science, a new technology company started out of Macmillan Publishers, providing tools for researchers. She's a technologist, open science advocate, and data nerd who works in her day job to make scientific research more efficient through better use of technology. Prior to moving to the UK to work for Digital Science, she managed the science division of Creative Commons where she worked to enable better knowledge sharing and research. She is also the external co-chair for Strata Conference in London, taking place October 1-2. For more about Digital Science, visit digital-science.com. You can follow her at @kaythaney.

About Alistair Croll

Alistair Croll is the founder of Bitcurrent, a research firm focused on emerging technologies. He's founded a variety of startups, and technology accelerators, including Year One Labs, CloudOps, Rednod, Coradiant (acquired by BMC in 2011) and Networkshop. He's a frequent speaker and writer on subjects such as entrepreneurship, cloud computing, Big Data, Internet performance and web technology, and has helped launch a number of major conferences on these topics.

Alistair has co-authored three books on Internet technology, including Web Operations (2010, O'Reilly), Complete Web Monitoring (2009, O'Reilly), and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks (1999, Prentice-Hall). A product manager by trade, he's also an advisor to a number of venture firms and the founder of the Bitnorth conference.

Most of what he says winds up on his blog, solveforinteresting.com, or on Twitter (@acroll).


Data Science for Agile Strategy. From Formula 1 to the Boardroom.
Simon Williams

Strategy has changed. The step-change is data abundance, speed and competition means that static business planning striving for that perfect answer are obsolete. We'll demonstrate how the Data Science underpinning race strategy engines used in Formula One to plan, track and update strategy in real-time are enabling Fortune 500 firms to be more agile. In this hyper-competitive environment differences are measured in hundredths of seconds and data informs decisions that can win or lose you races. We'll discuss how the techniques and principles used to underpin Race Strategy have translated successfully to industry with examples of how these have created advantage in strategy development, product direction and organisation design.

About Simon Williams

Chief Executive and Co-Founder of QuantumBlack, a Data Science agency that blends strategy, analytics and creative to derive insight from data to make faster, smarter decisions. Example projects include helping a global aerospace firm improve yield in strategic R&D investment, a leading media organisation to developing cutting-edge predictive audience network analytics, a leading software firm create a new visual language for biological research and several Formula One racing teams building race strategy engines.

Prior to QuantumBlack Simon led several data- driven start-ups including SmithBayes, a spin-out from Vodafone McLaren Mercedes Formula One racing team. Simon started his career in real-time trading systems at Reuters and then product management at ABN AMRO Bank.

Simon lives in London with his wife, young daughter and a rather eclectic iPod. He has a keen interest in architecture, cartography and (as an Arsenal fan) a love of beautiful yet frustrating sport.


Data: the future of city's public transport
Neal Lathia

Cities already hold over half of the world's population: in order to keep their residents moving, public transport infrastructure is becoming increasingly critical. Smart cards (like London's Oyster card) are already capturing vast amounts of data from network's passengers. My recent research has analysed this data and asked: what valuable services could be built for urban residents? This journey has uncovered wasteful patterns in Londoner's ticket-purchasing habits, inconsistencies in transport-policy incentives, and linked community's usage of public transport to social deprivation. However, it has also uncovered the potential that this data holds to address many shortcomings if it were combined with the techniques that are readily available and used daily by web services.

About Neal Lathia

Dr. Neal Lathia is a Research Associate in the Computer Laboratory at University of Cambridge, where he investigates how mobile data can be leveraged to learn about people's behaviours and build services to help them meet their goals. He obtained his PhD from University College London (with research about web recommender systems), has been a visiting researcher at Telefonica Barcelona, and has recently been an active member of the London Data Science group, which organises global data hackathons.


Big data in the 1950s
John Graham-Cumming

What did a big data project look like in 1955? I'll preview my StrataConf London talk coming later in the year with a look at the big data challenges that faced the early computing pioneers and how they are not so different from today's problems.

About John Graham-Cumming

John Graham-Cumming is a computer programmer and author. He studied mathematics and computation at Oxford and stayed for a doctorate in computer security. As a programmer he has worked in Silicon Valley and New York, the UK, Germany and France and currently works at CloudFlare. His open source POPFile program won a Jolt Productivity Award in 2004.

He is the author of a travel book for scientists published in 2009 called The Geek Atlas and has written articles for The Times, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, New Scientist and other publications.

He can be found on the web at jgc.org and on Twitter as @jgrahamc.

If you've heard of him at all, it's likely because in 2009 he successfully petitioned the British Government to apologize for the mistreatment of British mathematician Alan Turing.

He is a licensed radio amateur.


Data in Flight: The Science of Aircraft Information
Jayson Agagnier

Airplanes generate a lot of data. From flight plans to flight recorders, today's aircraft is both a collector of information, and a consumer of it. In this session, Bombardier's Jayson Agagnier takes us on a quick tour of the data that flows through airplanes, both in the air and on the ground, and considers the state of the art in telemetry, diagnostics, and other data applications that keep air travel working.