Making Data Work online conference

O’Reilly is hosting a conference on June 9 on the topic of the analysis of large data sets. The title of the conference is Making Data Work:

Ever since Hal Varian proclaimed that data analysis is the sexy career for the coming decade, people have been talking about data. And big data. And even bigger data.

This online conference, Making Data Work, brings together four experts on data and data analysis to show you what data is all about. How is data used in successful enterprises? What kinds of tools do you use to work wth the data? How do you use use visual techniques to give you insight to what the data is saying, and present those conclusions to others? Along the way, we’ll talk about topics such as statistics, machine learning, really large databases, and baseball, and we’ll look at industries as diverse as banking and biology.

Amongst the speakers are Mike Driscoll of Dataspora, who we’ve featured several times on this blog as an leading innovator of large-scale data analysis using the R language. Mike was also recently quoted in an article about Revolution and R in Forbes Magazine, and he recently published a most thought-provoking article about new tools for big-data analysis, and the processes needed to make the analysis itself help instead of hinder the decision-making process. Also speaking is Joe Adler from LinkedIn, author of the excellent R reference manual, R in a Nutshell. I’m not familiar with the work of the other two speakers, Hilary Mason (Bit.ly) and Ben Fry (Ben Fry LLC), but the abstracts for their talks on (respectively) machine learning and visualization look very interesting. 

Best of all, it’s an on-line conference, so you don’t even need to leave your desk to take part! Registration is just US$149, but as a sponsor Revolution Analytics has passes to give away — all you need to do is follow RevolutionR on Twitter for a chance to win one of three passes on Monday. Update: Winners will be selected at random from RevolutionR’s followers at 6PM PDT on Monday and notified via DM.

O’Reilly: Making Data Work Online Conference