Analytics Magazine Analytics Magazine, March/April 2014 | Page 70

CO N FERE N C E P R E V I E W S INFORMS Big Data Conference New event, set for June 22-24, to focus on the business of big data. How do you get from data discovery to return on investment and real business value? The INFORMS Big Data Conference, set for June 22-24 in San Jose, Calif., aims to help you discover just that. This newly launched topical conference will put the focus squarely on the business of big data. A major component of the conference will be case studies of big data projects that illustrate the complete journey from business problem to analytics solution. The conference committee is being spearheaded by Margery Connor, CAP, senior operations researcher-Advanced Analytics at Chevron, and Diego Klabjan, CAP, professor and director of the Master of Science in Analytics Program at Northwestern University. Other conference committee members are practitioners in the data arena, hailing from organizations such as Humana, IBM, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC, Intel, SAS, Alcatel-Lucent, and UPS. The talks are being arranged into 70 | A N A LY T I C S - M A G A Z I N E . O R G tracks on Case Studies, Big Data 101, and Emerging Trends. Other talks will address topics such as: • expediting the journey from business problem to analytics solution; • bridging the gap between decisionmakers, IT managers and analytics professionals; and • selecting and using the right big data technologies. Speakers are handpicked by the committee from an impressive list of “who’s who” in the field of big data. Anthony Goldbloom of Kaggle, Ion Stoica of UC- Berkeley, Paul Kent of SAS and Simon Zhang of LinkedIn have all confirmed they will share their best practices, success stories and lessons learned on real implementation of big data analytics. The Big Data 101 track will offer tutorials on how to navigate the big data ecosystem, how to select and use the right technologies, as well as the challenges of building data W W W. I N F O R M S . O R G