In this episode I spoke with Ion Stoica, cofounder and chairman of Databricks. Stoica is also a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, where he serves as director of the new RISE Lab (the successor to AMPLab). Fresh off the incredible success of AMPLab, RISE seeks to build tools and platforms that enable sophisticated real-time applications on live data, while maintaining strong security. As Stoica points out, users will increasingly expect security guarantees on systems that rely on online machine learning algorithms that make use of personal or proprietary data.

Data is Only as Valuable as the Decisions it Enables

O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators. At O’Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what’s new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term “open source” was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the “O’Reilly Radar.” And while we’re certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what’s interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about.

Data is Only as Valuable as the Decisions it Enables

O'Reilly Radar