Structure News: Recapping Structure Data 2016

Where The Data Was Actionable March 11th, 2016 / by Tom Krazit This week, we'll recap Structure Data 2016, a great week of interviews, talks, and conversations about the future of data-driven tools and strategies inside companies and organizations. STRUCTURE NEWS BUILDING DATA INFRASTRUCTURE AT STARTUP SPEED? STAND ON THE SHOULDERS OF THOSE BEFORE YOU June Andrews of Pinterest and Josh Wills of Slack (pictured) have two of the most interesting data science jobs in technology, building data science practices at fast-growing companies known for their focus on design. Thankfully, the prevalence of open-source software makes it easy to get off the ground, but as they explained, things can get quite tricky quite quickly. WHY DATA ANALYSIS TOOLS NEED TO GET SMARTER AND MORE ACCESSIBLE After focusing on gathering "big data" for so many years, data science needs to evolve to reach more people with smaller datasets, according to Chris Neumann, formerly of DataHero, and Dan Wagner of Civis Analytics. That means helping people and businesses develop the right questions to ask and making user-friendly tools. HOW THE ORLANDO MAGIC ARE USING DATA TO KEEP FANS HAPPY Using data to shorten beer lines might be the smartest use of data science yet. Orlando Magic CEO Alex Martins explained how working with John Paul of Venuenext has allowed the Magic to offer season-ticket holders perks while refining the club's ticket-pricing algorithms. THE ASCENT OF THE SENTIENT ROBOTS MAY HAVE BEEN OVERSOLD While the robots might be coming for our jobs, they're probably not going to destroy us. Yet. Artificial intelligence expert Andrew Ng of Baidu predicted that we'll see the commercialization of self-driving vehicles in three years and mainstream use in five, but "worrying about killer robots today is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars," he said. INDUSTRY NEWS GOOGLE JOINS THE OPEN COMPUTE PROJECT Back in the day, Google was notorious for treating the designs for its world-class datacenters and networks like state secrets. A lot has changed since then, and Google's embrace of the Open Compute Project this week (a movement launched by rival Facebook) with its power-efficient rack designs is a notable and laudable shift, as reported by Techcrunch. HOW WE BUILD CODE AT NETFLIX Netflix also dropped some knowledge this week, explaining how it writes code on local machines and deploys that code to its servers running in Amazon Web Services' cloud. The company has managed to reduce the time it takes to deploy some of its code to 16 minutes, from local machines to a multiregional deployment.   BIG PICTURE Over the years we've put together Structure Data, I'm not sure we've assembled a better lineup of speakers. We had the CEOs of all the major big data companies, world-renowned experts in artificial intelligence from the most powerful internet companies on the planet, and representatives from the next generation of data-driven startups like Uber and Airbnb. But when I look back at the week, I'm also struck by how many conversations that I hope we continued, or even started, about the impact of big data on society. We explored how the health care system is changing in response to the data era, albeit at a frustrating pace. Kalev Leetaru of GDELT delivered a legendary Structure Data talk on the power of data to understand our world (and passionately explained his work and love of data science all week on the sidelines). And Sugreev Chawla of Thorn showed how data is helping law enforcement track down some of the most horrifying elements of our world, like child traffickers and pornographers. Harnessing data has made our websites better, our computers more efficient, and our advertising more lucrative. And while all of those outcomes are great, it's important that we recognize and assist those who are using the latest in data science tools in important ways without regard for the profit motive. Thanks to our speakers, sponsors, attendees, and everyone else who made Structure Data 2016 such a great event. We'll see you all again soon.       DISCOVER MORE   Click here to unsubscribe from this list. Our mailing address is: Structure 405 El Camino Real, #215 Menlo Park, CA 94025 Add us to your address book Copyright (C) 2016 Structure All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend. Update your profile.