February 2016 Meetup

Dear HUGUK members

Join us on February 23 for our monthly meetup at the new Hotels.com office in Angel Square (Block 1, EC1V 1NS) - directions below.

Our line up this time includes 4 great talks about IBM Watson and cognitive computing, Big data & geographic datasets, Hadoop at the Home Office and Privitar's approach to data analytics while protecting consumer privacy - details below.

We would like to thank Hotels.com as our evening host and sponsor.

Looking forward to seeing you there,

Sebastian

http://photos2.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/9/7/a/a/600_446738826.jpeg

1. Intelligence Augmented vs Artificial Intelligence. Alex Flamant, IBM Watson

Short summary: IBM is developing the Watson Ecosystem to leverage its Developer Cloud, APIs, Content Store and Talent Hub. This is part of IBM's recent announcement of the $1B investment in Watson as a new business unit including Silicon Alley NYC headquarters. For the first time, IBM will open up Watson as a development platform in the Cloud to spur innovation and fuel a new ecosystem of entrepreneurial software app providers who will bring forward a new generation of applications infused with Watson's cognitive computing intelligence.

Bio: Alex Flamant is EMEA Business Development Manager for the IBM Watson Ecosystem. He is also organiser of the London.AI meetup and has a strong interest in early-stage machine learning and NLP projects with focus on BlueChip-Startup collaborations.

2. Using Big Data techniques to query and store OpenStreetMap data. Stephen Knox, digital.Arup

Short summary: This talk will describe his research into using Hadoop to query and manage big geographic datasets, specifically OpenStreetMap(OSM). OSM is an “open-source” map of the world, growing at a large rate, currently around 5TB of data. The talk will introduce OSM, detail some aspects of the research, but also discuss his experiences with using the SpatialHadoop stack on Azure and Google Cloud.

Bio: Stephen Knox is a Senior Geographic Information Consultant within Arup’s Digital practice. Stephen develops web-facing mapping and dashboard solutions for clients, working on both the user facing side to create visually appealing interfaces, and the application backend to ensure consistency in data and application behaviour. He has formerly been involved in the transport industry and has also created a number of location-aware mobile phone apps.

3. Using Hadoop to support a person centric approach to providing UK Home Office services. Stephen Deakin & Simon Bond, Home Office

Short summary:Home Office is using Hadoop to create a set of responsive interactive services for borders, immigration and policing around the POLE (Person, Object, Location, Event) data model. By creating a shared data platform across operational business units, with a shared set of integrated services, Home Office are pushing the boundaries of Big Data and Hadoop, with the aim of making more efficient and effective, data led decisions and ultimately making the UK a safer place to live, work and travel.

Bio:Stephen Deakin is currently consulting on the Common Data Platform for the Home Office. Prior to this engagement he was the Interim CTO for the Metropolitan Police Service, co-chaired the National Police Technology Council and was a Non-Executive Director of the Police ICT Company. Stephen has also held technical leadership positions in financial services companies including MoneySuperMarket.com, Coutts Bank, NatWest and most recently Barclays.

Simon Bond is head of Strategy and Architecture for the Home Office, the government department responsible for Borders, Visas and Immigration, Passports, Policing and Counter Terrorism. In twenty years of industry experience, Simon has worked in both public and private sectors to successfully deliver solutions and develop strategies for major technology and Business programmes.

4. Extracting maximum value from data while protecting consumer privacy.
   Jason McFall, Privitar

Short summary: Big organisations have a wealth of rich customer data which opens up huge new opportunities. However, they have the challenge of how to extract value from this data while protecting the privacy of their individual customers. He will talk about the risks organisations face, and what they should do about it. He will survey the techniques which can be used to make data safe for analysis, and talk briefly about how they are solving this problem at Privitar.

Bio: Jason McFall is CTO at Privitar, a London startup which adds privacy protection to Hadoop by using machine learning and statistical techniques to open up data for safe secondary use, without violating individual privacy. Jason has a background in applying machine learning to marketing automation and customer analytics. Before that he was an experimental physicist, working on Particle Physics collider experiments.