Our topic for November is Big Data. Big and small companies have always tried to figure out how to store, organize and manage the data that they create and capture. Now that there are massive, ever growing new data sources from internal clickstreams to external twitter feeds, companies are overwhelmed with data. But some startups, unsaddled by old architectures and preconceived notions, are taking advantage of the combination of enormous new data sources, cheap storage and new analysis tools and techniques in order to change their product, their customers and their businesses. For this month’s dinner and the final regular meeting of the year, we’ve invited Jeff Hammerbacher, Chief Scientist at Cloudera and the founder of Facebook’s Data team, and Roger Magoulas, director of market research at O’Reilly, to talk about Big Data.
Jeff Hammerbacher
Jeff Hammerbacher is Chief Scientist and VP of Products at Cloudera. He was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Accel Partners immediately prior to joining Cloudera. Before Accel, he conceived, built, and led the Data team at Facebook. The Data team was responsible for driving many of the applications of statistics and machine learning at Facebook, as well as building out the infrastructure to support these tasks for massive data sets. The team produced two open source projects: Hive, a system for offline analysis built above Hadoop, and Cassandra, a structured storage system on a P2P network. Before joining Facebook, Jeff was a quantitative analyst on Wall Street. Jeff earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Mathematics from Harvard University.
Roger Magoulas
Roger Magoulas is Research Director at O’Reilly Media. Magoulas runs a team that is building an open source analysis infrastucture and provides analysis services, including technology trend analysis, to business decision-makers at O’Reilly and beyond. In previous incarnations, Magoulas designed and implemented data warehouse projects for organizations ranging from the San Francisco Opera to the Alberta Motor Club.
