Finding Problem Solvers Who Provide Big Answers: An Interview with Harper Reed
Harper Reed, CTO for the Obama 2012 Presidential Campaign, delivered the keynote speech at EMC Greenplum’s Hadoop: The Foundation for Change event on Monday, February 25. Reed delivered what he called “A Big Data intervention,” urging the audience to move the conversation beyond Big Data, toward what he called “Big Answers.” He noted that technologists are “often bad at listening when it comes to data,” and said that practitioners “should be using these insights from data to do more listening.” He stated technologists must ask themselves, “‘How do we use targeting to have a conversation?’”
Running the most data-driven Presidential campaign to date presented unique challenges.
Read more »
Scott Yara’s Strata Keynote: Data and Collaboration In “An Extraordinary Time”
Greenplum co-founder, Scott Yara struck an inspirational tone during his keynote at the Strata Conference #strataconf on Wednesday, February 27th in Santa Clara. Yara cast a wide net, paying tribute to the practitioners who have pushed the data community forward and inspired Greenplum’s vision, emphasizing collaboration and the wide swath of sectors and issues that data science can deliver insight on.
Read more »
Harper Reed on the Power of Data, at Hadoop: the Foundation for Change
Big Data’s impact is wide-ranging, from business to media, the sciences to politics. These massive shifts are largely powered by Hadoop, a flexible, scalable, and inexpensive platform that boasts considerable enterprise investment and a rich developer ecosystem. Hadoop: The Foundation for Change, on Monday, February 25th in San Francisco, will reveal Greenplum’s new technology to extend the platform’s impact and reach, and look to the data-driven future with a keynote speech by Harper Reed, Former CTO for the Obama 2012 Campaign.
Read more »
Heroic Feats of Data Scientists Doing Good
Data scientists are a tireless lot: between using their multidisciplinary skills to solve critical business challenges, fielding job offers, and competing in Kaggle competitions, many practitioners moonlight in service of the public good. These heroic data divers serve a critical need, devoting nights and weekends to munging messy XML files, developing models, and unearthing insights for non-profits and advocacy groups that lack these skills or resources.
Read more »
Ethics and the Data-Driven Enterprise
Despite the prodigious business value, civic innovation, and predictive insight yielded from the cascading streams of Big Data, there are critical questions regarding who has access to what information, and how actionable insight will impact the lives of the human beings beyond the dashboard.
Read more »
The 2012 Election and the Importance of Effectively Communicating Data-Driven Insights
The big winner – or at least the biggest story – of the 2012 Election may be Big Data and the practice of data science. From the Obama campaign’s data-driven electioneering directed by Chief Scientist Rayid Ghani, to the pundit-confounding and uncannily accurate projections of Nate Silver and other statisticians, this may go down as “The Nerdiest Election Ever,” as Wired‘s Spencer Ackerman declared.
Read more »
The 2012 Code for America Summit: Democracy Behind and Beyond the Dashboard
The growth of the civic tech movement in recent years is impressive. Ranging from citizen-developed bus tracking mobile apps to municipal and federal open data portals, the scope and goals of these efforts vary widely. What unites this loose-knit federation of policy makers, developers, data divers, journalists, advocacy groups, and entrepreneurs is the goal to apply the innovations of open source software, the real-time web, and Big Data analytics, to make government more efficient, transparent, and representative.
Read more »
Data Challenge Winners Tell The Stories Within Civic Data
Despite the increasing number of cities embracing open data policies and the popularity of visualizations, communicating the stories found in all that data remains a challenge. Journalists, developers, and advocacy groups alike contend with a wealth of civic data, but often lack the technical skills or the storytelling acumen to reap its potential social benefits.
Read more »
Nate Silver on the 2012 Election and the “Prediction Paradox”
Following the conclusion of the Republican and Democratic national conventions, we’re mercifully facing down the final days of this election season. With the race heating up, policy wonks and voters are turning their attention to the other breakout star from 2008′s Presidential race: statistician and blogger Nate Silver, whose predictive models during that race proved more accurate than the projections of expert pollsters and the pundits.
Read more »
Receive Weekly Updates
Recent Blog Posts
- Beginning Wednesday, Join Us at the Pivotal Blog
- Making Hadoop MapReduce Work with a Redis Cluster
- Pivotal, A NEW PLATFORM FOR A NEW ERA
- Effective Data Visualization Techniques, from Business to Social Advocacy
- A Robot Gave Me My Job!
Top Tags
Authors
- Adam Shook
- Annika Jimenez
- Bhooshan Mogal
- Bill Jacobs
- Chung-Ho Chen
- Derek Lin
- Donald Miner
- Florian Waas
- Guest Blogger
- Josh Klahr
- Lauren Volpi
- Logan Lee
- Michael Howard
- Mike Maxey
- Milind Bhandarkar
- Paul M. Davis
- Sameer Tiwari
- SK (Saravana) Krishnamurthy
- Vitthal (a.k.a Suhas) Gogate
- Will Davis
