Strata Schemata: An Agenda of Sorts

This time next week, if all goes as planned, I’ll be on a plane back to Logan with a head full of data, a twitter account full of people who work with data, and a suitcase full of shorts. The Strata Conference, which takes starts this Tuesday, February 28^th, and goes through Thursday, March 1^st, is one of the country’s preeminent data science conferences. Certainly its sessions, which, in addition to the data scientists themselves, target CTOs/CIOs, marketers and journalists, are the broadest a’beam of any I’ve seen. And its speakers are (deservedly) bold-faced names to even the greenest of data geeks: Doug Cutting (Cloudera), Ben Goldacre (Bad Science), Hal Varian (Google), Mike Olson (Cloudera), JP Morgenthal (EMC), Alistair Croll (Bitcurrent), Usman Haque (Pachube), Coco Krumme (MIT Media Lab), O’Reilly’s own Edd Dumbill… It’s a lot to take in, especially if you, like me, are the type who panics at buffets and department stores. So, to help the both of us, I’ve made up a “Can’t Miss List (for the Social Strategist).” Annnd, since I’ll warrant that many, if not most, of you are not social strategists, I’m also giving you a “Can’t Miss List (for the CEO/Chief Scientist,” courtesy of our own CEO, David Wihl. You can thank, or debate, with both of us in the comments, on Twitter, or, best yet, at the show!

Can’t Miss List (for the Social Strategist)

Name	Handle	Presentation	Time
Ken Krugler	kkrugler	Large scale web mining	Tues, 9am
Mike Bowles Jeremy Howard	mike_bow jeremyphoward	The Two Most Important Algorithms in Predictive Modeling Today	Tues, 1:30pm
Billy Bosworth		Data as a Strategic Weapon - Walmart, Netfix and Apigee Panel Discussion	Wed, 10:40am
Marcel Salathé	marcelsalathe	Understanding Social Contagion	Wed, 11:30am
Jesper Andersen	jandersen	Building a Data Narrative: Discovering Haight Street	Wed, 1:30pm
Philip Kromer	mrflip	Disambiguation: Embrace wrong answers & find truth	Wed, 2:20pm
Xavier Amatriain	xamat	Netflix recommendations: beyond the 5 stars	Wed, 4:00pm
Christopher Berry	cjpberry	Data Science in Marketing Analytics	Wed, 4:50pm
Jim Adler Solon Barocas	jim_adler s010n	If Data Wants to Be Free, is Privacy a Prison?	Thurs, 10:40am
Nathan Marz	nathanmarz	Storm: distributed and fault-tolerant realtime computation	Thurs, 11:30am
Alyona Medelyan	zelandiya	Mining Unstructured Data: Practical Applications	Thurs, 1:30pm
Ben Goldacre Kaitlin Thaney	Bengoldacre kaythaney	It's Not "Junk" [Data] Anymore	Thurs, 2:20pm
Mark Hahnel	figshare	It's Not "Junk" [Data] Anymore	Thurs, 2:20pm
Robbie Allen	robbieallen	From Big Data to Big Insights	Thurs, 4:00pm
Marc Smith	marc_smith	Mapping social media networks (with no coding) using NodeXL	Thurs, 4:50pm

Can't Miss List for the CEO/Chief Scientist

Name	Handle	Presentation	Time
Michael Rys	sqlservermike	SQL and NoSQL Are Two Sides Of The Same Coin	Tues, 9:00am
Claudia Perlich		From Knowing ‘What’ To Understanding ‘Why’	Tues, 9:45am
Monica Rogati	mrogati	The Model and the Train Wreck: A Training Data How-to	Tues, 11:00am
Jacob Perkins	thedatachef	Corpus Bootstrapping with NLTK	Tues, 11:30am
Ben Gimpert	someben	The Importance of Importance: An Introduction to Feature Selection	Tues, 12:00pm
Matt Biddulph	mattb	Social Network Analysis Isn’t Just For People	Tues, 1:30pm
Robert Lefkowitz	r0ml	Array Theory vs. Set Theory in Managing Data	Tues, 2:15pm
Robert Lancaster	rob1lancaster	Survival Analysis for Cache Time-to-Live Optimization	Tues, 3:30pm
Eric Badeschwieler	jeric14	The Future of Hadoop: Becoming an Enterprise Standard	Wed, 10:40am
Alexander Stojanovic	stojanovic	Unleash Insights On All Data With Microsoft Big Data	Wed, 11:30am
Pascal Boillat		Changing Data Standards from Wall Street to DC and Beyond	Wed, 1:30pm
Jen Zeralli		Big Data: Wall Street Style	Wed, 2:20pm
Kuntal Malia		Analytics in a Community-Driven Fashion Retailer	Wed, 4:00pm
Leigh Dodds	ldodds	Linked Data: Turning the Web into a Context Graph	Wed, 4:50pm
Kirkland Barrett		Democratizing BI at Microsoft: 40,000 Users and Counting	Thurs, 10:40am
Stefan Groschupf	datameer	Hadoop Analytics in Financial Services	Thurs, 11:30am
Alyona Medelyan	zelandiya	Mining Unstructured Data: Practical Applications	Thurs, 1:30pm
Robbie Allen	robbieallen	From Big Data to Big Insights	Thurs, 4:00pm
Marc Smith	marc_smith	Mapping social media networks (with no coding) using NodeXL	Thurs, 4:50pm