The Economic Opportunity of BigData: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in a Rapidly Changing Data Landscape

Unstructured Data and the BigData platforms force a disruptive change that left most enterprises in a major Data Chaos. The combination of economic drivers in enterprise computing, the need to leverage semi-structured and unstructured Data, and the emergence of the Internet of Things (IOT) is driving a dramatic shift in the Enterprise Data landscape. Hadoop and the Open Source have accelerated the changes to a point of confusion. Today’s data analyst faces a bewildering environment of technologies and challenges involving semi-structured and unstructured data with access methodologies that have almost no relation to the past. An equal confusion is faced by IT and business users. Data Scientists end up spending their valuable time dealing with many issues but core Data Science. In the meantime, the ability to drive significant business value from “Data Assets” has never been greater. With rapid developments in AI and Machine Learning, the need to systematically and automatically leverage the proper data assets has become even more urgent. This talk will cover: 1 Why is BigData different and Economic drivers for change in storage technology 2 issues and challenges in how to make the benefits of advanced analytics fit within the application environment. 3 The requirement for Real-time data streaming and analysis is stronger than ever. 4 Why Data Science and several related fields like AI, Macine learning have become critical to almost all future analytical tasks. 5 How every company is becoming a BigData company, even the smallest of organizations 6 4 real case studies to demonstrate and discuss the challenges and the great opportunities for BigData and Data Science.

Usama is Chairman at Open Insights focusing on AI, BigData strategy, and new business models for Data. He is the Inaugural Executive Director of the Institute for Experiential AI at Northeastern University where he is also professor of computer science. He was Global Chief Data Officer at Barclays Bank in London (2013-2016) after launching a key tech startup accelerator in MENA (2010-2013) as Executive Chairman of Oasis500. He was Chairman/CEO/CTO at several Seattle/Silicon Valley tech startups and the first person to hold the title: Chief Data Officer when Yahoo! acquired his 2nd startup in 2004. He held leadership roles at Microsoft (1996-2000) and founded the Machine Learning Systems group at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (1989-1996) where he was awarded Caltech’s top Excellence in Research award & a U.S. Government medal from NASA. Usama published over 100 technical articles, holds over 30 patents, is a Fellow of both Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Association of Computing Machinery. He is a recipient of both the ACM SIGKDD Awards for Innovation and for Service. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and holds two BSE’s in Electrical and Computer Engineering, MSE Computer Engineering and M.Sc. in Mathematics.