Our 27th meetup as a joint venture with DataScience.be was a huge succes! The goal was to give a thorough introduction of Big Data to the data scientists and business people of both organizations.
In total, 221 participants registered over both communities! Unfortunatley, quite a lot of people did not make it last night. That is probably due to the EU top that was happening yesterday. (Note that the meetup was held at the VUB in Elsene.) But it was still a huge crowd.
Presentations on Big Data for Data Science
Philippe Van Impe, co-organizer of DataScience.be, gave an overview of last years activities of the DataScience.be community. He focussed specifically on their data for good and hackaton initiatives. In the presentation, he hid a product placement for BigBoards: on one of the pictures from a hackaton, Kris Peeter’s Hex was visible in the foreground. The Hex was used to do social network analysis!
Next, the DataScience.be’s team who have been working on their Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), presented an overview of their work and results. The team was lead by Edward Vanden Berghe. They received a dataset from MSF on the organisation’s donations. The team screened the dataset for donator segmentations and looked for actionable insights to help MSF improve their revenues.
As 3rd speaker, I gave an introduction to Big Data and what it can mean to organisations, large and small. Finally, I touched on the importance of data science to give meaning to the data.
Daan Gerits took over and got into the details of how to setup a scalable and resilient Big Data architecture.
After the break, Ferdinand Casier en Mathias Verbeke exposed their EluciDATA project which starts in 2015. The goals is to help Belgian companies with data innovation. Any questions or request for participation can be send to info@elucidata.be!
And last but not least, Karim Douïeb explained how they are using Spark for call record details analysis for mobile operators. Really interesting!
The meetup ended at about 21h30 with a Q&A session with all presenters together. Very thoughtful questions were raised by a sharp audience!
Thank you all for participating!!!
Images from the 27th meetup
