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Cloudera Co-Founder Mike Olson shares his insights on the present landscape and possible future of big data and the data management industry. In conversation with Ping Li of Accel Partners, Olson also discusses the advantages of building a business on top of open source technologies and the many surprising benefits of competition.

Mike Olson, Ping Li - Opportunities Abound in the Big Data Space

Social Science, Small worlds and Big Data

Dr. Mark Gerstein of Yale University speaks to CHI on January 16, 2015. Dr. Gerstein will be a speaker during the Clinical Genomics track at Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, April 21-23, 2015 in Boston, MA.
 
Topics include evolving data science applications to genomics, the utility of networks for biological data analysis and integration, studying non-coding mutations for cancer genomics and personal genomics research, the computational tool FunSeq and more.

http://www.bio-itworldexpo.com/

BioIT World 2015 | Applying Data Science, Bioinformatics and Networks to Cancer Genomics

Not surprisingly, Joseph Sirosh, has big ambitions for his product portfolio at Microsoft which includes Azure ML, HDInsight and other tools. Chief among them is making it easy for mere mortals to consume these data services from the applications they're familiar with. Take Excel for example.

If a financial analyst can, with a few clicks, send data to a forecast service in the cloud, then get the numbers back, visualized on the same spreadsheet, that's a pretty powerful story, said Sirosh who is corporate VP of machine learning for Microsoft.

But as valuable as those applications and services are, more and more of the value to be derived from computation over time will be the data itself, not all those tech underpinnings.  "In the future a huge part of the value generated from computing will come from the data as opposed to storage and operating systems and basic infrastructure," he noted on this week's podcast. WHich is why one topic under discussion at next month's Structure Data show will be who owns all the data flowing betwixt and betweeen various systems, the internet of things etc.

When it comes to getting corporations running these new systems Microsoft may have an ace in the hole because so many of them already use key Microsoft tools -- Active Directory, SQL Server, Excel. That gives them a pretty good on-ramp to Microsoft Azure and its resident services. Sirosh makes a compelling case and we'll talk to him more on stage at Structure Data next month in New York City.

In the first half of the show, Derrick Harris and I talk about the Hadoop world has returned to its feisty and oh so interesting roots. When Pivotal announced its plan to offload support of Hadoop to Hortonworks and work with that company along with IBM, GE on  the Open Data Platform the response from Cloudera CEO Mike Olsen in a blog post with his take. 

Also on the docket, @WalmartLabs massive OpenStack production private cloud implementation.

Microsoft's machine learning guru on why data matters sooooo much

"Machine learning is to big data as human learning is to life experience," says Christopher Nguyen, the co-founder and CEO of big data intelligence company Adatao. Sure, but then, what IS big data? (especially as it's become a buzzword that captures so many things)... 

On this episode of the a16z Podcast, Nguyen puts on his former computer science professor hat to describe 'big data' in relation to 'machine learning' -- as well as what comes next with 'deep learning'. Finally, the former Google exec shares how Hadoop and Spark evolved from the efforts of companies dealing with massive amounts of real-time information; what we need to make machine learning a property of every application (why would we even want to?); and how we can make all this intelligence accessible to everyone.

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a16z Podcast: Making Sense of Big Data, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning

Big Data is evolving. It’s moving from the sole domain of the high priests of data science, to something that practically every organization -- big and small -- and every group within that organization can get its hands on. So what happens now? The implications of the democratization of Big Data are bigger than just big, says Prat Moghe, CEO and Founder of Cazena.

And it’s not just the corporate world that will benefit, he adds, having access to Big Data tools will change how all kinds of organizations, including government agencies and other social services, operate and solve their particular problems

Joining Prat on the pod to describe this changing world of Big Data in the Cloud is a16z’s Peter Levine. If every company, and every organization is becoming a data-driven company, it makes sense to start to put that data to work, Levine says.


a16z Podcast: Big Data Goes Really Big

How is Big Data — the information generated from Google searches, GPS, online shopping and more — changing our lives? Kara Miller asked a panel of experts about the benefits and downsides of the international information database.

Big Data Special: Part 1

A weekly podcast from GigaOM providing the latest news, analysis and interviews about the cloud, infrastructure and big data spaces. 

Microsoft's machine learning guru on why data matters sooooo much

Gigaom Structure