Big data

This week has taken place in Barcelona the 1st edition of Big Data Congress, organized by the Center of Excellence in Big Data. From 3 to 4 November, more than 1000 Big Data professionals, providers and companies that are developing or want to develop Big Data and Data Analytics projects have been able to share their expertise and knowledge, and to generate a networking environment between them.

During the first day, trends, challenges and success real stories were presented in order to show how to extract value from data to manage more effectively and efficiently the needs of citizens and clients.

The second day, trends and technological use cases in data analytics were presented, along with Big Data infrastructures and information visualization tools.

Additionally, in the conference was set a space to show examples of start-ups that based their business in data.

The conference shows Big Data is in good health, a sector that some experts calculate will create 900000 workplaces in Europe in 6 years!!

If you could not attend to the conference do not worry, organizers say all presentations and videos will be available on the Big Data Congress web in few days.

Enjoy it!

Andreu Sulé

University of Barcelona

Hello,

The Instituto Cervantes hosted at 11^th December 2014 the conference Big data and libraries: converting data into knowledge. The meeting aimed to shed light on this new professional field and role playing from the library environment and documentary massive data processing, in order to identify new opportunities untapped.

Organizers have had the excellent initiative to make accessible all talk videos, in addition of an interview to each speaker and their presentation. There, you can find the Big data dealt with several point of views:  computer science (Mateo Valero); privacy and data protection (Judith González); technology (Óscar Méndez);  retrieval of information (Jorge Serrano); etc.

Sincerely, some of these talks show us a very enthusiastic future, but others make my hair stand on end. They figure a world that remembers me the famous George Orwell’s book “1984”. Scary!

Enjoy it!

Andreu Sulé

University of Barcelona