The Data Day Texas conference in Austin once again brought together hundreds of folks in the Texas big data community for one data-filled day. Here are the presentations that we thought were “best of show.”
Lisa Green, Director of Common Crawl, discussed the challenges of capturing open data at web scale. Her talk touched on the difficulty behind the lack of standards for formatting and interoperability as well as the amazing wealth of open data now available online.
Andrew Trask and David Gilmore from Digital Reasoning gave a compelling presentation on Deep Learning. They talked about the system they’re building to tackle common natural language processing (NLP) obstacles around syntactic, lexical, semantic, and contextual issues. These can lead to breakthroughs in areas like sentiment analysis.
Keith Casey from Clarify discussed what sets them apart and how they make audio analysis scalable. Audio search is one of the many niche search opportunities yet to be conquered. It’s also one of the most intriguing given the volume and value of data stored in audio files. Identifying and retrieving content embedded in apps, images, and video files is likely to be an area of intense activity over the next few years.
Idibon‘s CEO, Robert Munro, presented Building Better Experts: the co-optimization of human and machine intelligence. He examined why the “cost of human processing has remained unchanged and remains an expensive task,” emphasizing human engagement as an indispensable resource. Idibon’s staff includes subject matter experts, linguists, and crowdsourcing managers.
