Diving In The Deep End of The Big Data Pool: Talk Abstract

This is the Abstract for my Ignite talk at the Strata+Hadoop Barcelona conference, on Wed Nov 19th, 2014 (at CCIB, room 116, 5:30PM). I haven’t found any place where O’Reilly would publish that abstract, and I thought some people would want a peek at what I’d talk about.

##TL;DR##

Can you take four analytical PhDs fresh out of school, make them tackle a big data project, and solve a business problem? Can you do it in a month? This was the bet of the Data Science bootcamp this talk will report on. In this frantic story, you’ll hear about ramping up, knowledge sharing, implementation woes, and the joy of discovery. And you’ll learn about assembling your next data commando.

##Abstract## This is an experience report of one of the six Data Science bootcamps that ran over the summer 2014. Science to Data Science (S2DS) was organized in London by Strata speaker Kim Nilsson pairing recent PhDs with industry mentors on a hands-on project.

The speaker and his three colleagues thus worked with Weve, on a project that involved finding overlooked and relevant market segments in millions of mobile phone customers.

This talk will address the challenges of four former academics in making sense of industry’s complex business rules, sharing knowledge at a breakneck pace, choosing algorithms, tools and implementations when not one of them is an exact fit for the problem and time frame, and finally on what made us succeed despite all of the above.