Daniel L. Goroff (@DGoroff, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, see picture below) kick off the morning session with a talk about behavioral biases and bayesian statistics, a really brave non-trivial topic to give a talk about!

Dan Elron (@danelron, Accenture, see pictures below) held a nice talk detailing the opportunities offered to business by “Big Data” to gain better insight.

Next, David Boyle (@Beglen, SVP Insight, EMI Music) talked about the challenges facing the music industry. Below, the most-loved forms of entertainment are listed (obtained by large-scale market research). Music beats all of the ones listed below.

After lunch, Gary Kearns (@garykearns1, Mastercard) talked about their “big data” data mining service to companies to provide business insights based on their creditcard transactions.

Next, it was our turn. Dauwe Vercamer (@DauweVercamer, UGent MSc Business Engineering) and yours truly (@DirkVandenPoel, Professor of Marketing Analytics, Ghent University, for our research click here...) presented the talk “Case Study: Data-Driven Door-to-Door Sales” detailing the potential of using marketing predictive analytics combined with logistics route optimization.

The next day marked a big announcement by Cloudera of its Impala project, an alternative to the MapReduce framework to efficiently handle real-time queries.

In-between sessions, one could always visit the exhibit floor. Below, you see the booths by Pentaho, Revolution R, and SAS. This is just a small selection...

Matt Winkler (@mwinkle, Microsoft, see pictures below) gave a nice talk about the integration of Hadoop/Azure with Javascript and Microsoft .NET. Dauwe and I were really impressed by the capabilities! Microsoft may very well strike gold with their approach.

Next, I attended Todd Lipcon (@tlipcon, Cloudera, see picture below) and Sanjay Radia (@srr, Hortonworks)’s talk about HDFS (the Hadoop file system). They brought us up-to-speed on the latest developments around the file system.

That evening, it was time for a great party ... with lots of food, great music, performance, ...

Next morning, I first attended Robert Kirkpatrick (@rgkirkpatrick, Director)’s talk about Global Pulse, a program to form, and to help facilitate, partnerships in both the public and private sector to explore how emerging technologies and new sources of data can help the United Nations’ effort to improve the well-being of the world.

Next, I attended Dr. Blake Shaw (@metablake, Data Scientist at Foursquare)’s talk about what to do with 3 billion+ check-ins. Places turn out to have very distinct time signatures. One can rank neighborhoods according to similarity. Foursquare’s Explore function allows them to analyze to which extent people actually visit the places they “explored” before... (i.e., allows to assess to which extent people turn clickthroughs to walkthroughs). It also allows for the evaluation of traffic to retail locations (e.g., whether it’s primarily “social network” driven, see social graph below).

Next, we attended another session by Microsoft. This time by the SQL Server Engineering group. They talked about Analytics over Streaming Data to answer questions about data “in flight”.

Microsoft really was omni-present at this conference. Moreover, that same night, it introduced its Surface tablet of course running the new Windows 8. Below, you see a picture of the Windows display booths at Times Square, just a few blocks from the conference venue.

Next morning, there was a huge crowd lined up in front of the newly opened Microsoft Store at Times Square.

Moreover, we got the opportunity to meet the program manager and lead designer of the Microsoft Surface (Panos Panay @SlowGreek and Ralf Groene @ralfgroene, see picture below):

In sum, the Strata + Hadoop event was a “Big Data” success! Congratulations to the organizers. Not just the talks/sessions were great, but one also meets amazing people at this event. Then, it was time to leave New York City, because hurricane Sandy was approaching rapidly...