8:45 AM
Keynotes
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
David Weinberger, Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
Description: AI and the internet are transforming our understanding of how the future happens, enabling us to acknowledge the chaotic unknowability of our everyday world.
Back when we humans were the only ones writing programs, data looked like the oil fueling those programs. But now that machines are programming themselves, data looks more like the engine than its fuel. This is changing how we think about the world from which data arises, and that data is now shaping as never before. We’ve accepted that the intelligence of machine intelligence resides in its data, not just its algorithms—particularly in the countless, complex, contingent, and multidimensional interrelationships of data. But where does the intelligence of data come from? It comes from the world that the data reflects. That's why machine learning models can be so complex, we can't always understand them. The world is the ultimate black box. Weinberger looks at the implications of this for people who work with data.
10:45 AM
Modern Data Strategy Essentials Today
Length: 1 Hour
Description: Collecting, querying, and manipulating data are important, but analyzing it well provides a competitive advantage.
Title: Making Self Service Work: How to Empower, Align, & Retain Data Analysts
Time: 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Description: Organizations employ many data analysts embedded in various departments and business units. These data analysts cost organizations millions of dollars in wages annually. Surprisingly, corporate data teams don’t know most of the data analysts in their organization, nor do they have a strategy to align them or optimize their organization’s investment in them. Eckerson presents a comprehensive strategy for empowering data analysts; describes how to make a business case for developing a self-service strategy that optimizes their time and output; and explains how to motivate and retain data analysts (people), how to organize and manage data analysts (organizations), how to govern data analyst output (process), and how to select tools and products that enable them to work as efficiently and effectively as possible (technology).
What’s Next in Data & Analytics Architecture
Length: 1 Hour
Description: Legacy data architecture needs to be modernized to meet today’s data and analytics needs.
Title: Lessons Learned From Moving to a Modern Data Architecture
Time: 10:45 AM - 11:15 AM
Description: Capital One’s move to the cloud required it to modernize its data operations for this new environment. This meant learning how to balance the flexibility and efficiency of managing data in the cloud in order to generate the most value from its data. Bharathan shares more on the decisions Capital One made throughout this journey around monitoring, access, schema management, resiliency, cost, security, load patterns, and governance. He shares lessons learned—what worked, and what didn’t—and more on the tools Capital One developed to ensure a well-managed, well-governed cloud data platform.
Title: From DBA to Data Engineer—The Strategic Role of DBAs in the Cloud
Time: 11:15 AM - 11:30 AM
Description: Over the past few years, the IT landscape has experienced significant disruptions. Many of these transformations are reshaping database administrator roles in organizations, from the introduction of new technologies to the increasing size and complexity of the database environment. Additionally, emerging data types and modern applications drive enterprises to adopt new data platforms. DBAs are under pressure to continually evolve to support ongoing innovation. The roles and duties traditionally performed by DBAs have changed as cloud adoption and automation become commonplace.
Title: Presentation by Gigaspaces
Time: 11:30 AM - 11:45 AM
Description: Check the website for updates.
Data Mesh & Data Fabric Boot Camp
Length: 1 Hour
Description: Data silos continue to impede access to needed information. Solutions are on the horizon.
Title: Data Mesh Is Not Only an Architecture
Time: 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Description: With a 133-year history, Northern Trust has a backbone of IT infrastructure built decades ago, when on-premises solutions dominated the technology landscape. Due to the complexity of global regional regulatory requirements and the limitations of legacy systems, valuable data assets are maintained and isolated only in online transactional processing (OLTP) databases. The company faced challenges in data sharing, management, and governance in supporting enterprise-level analytics projects to meet business needs and growth. A digital modernization initiative took place that had a data mesh ecosystem as a critical component, leveraging cloud services on Azure and other modern technologies.
AI & Machine Learning Summit
Length: 1 Hour
Description: There’s no stopping the introduction of AI-based technologies into the enterprise.
Title: Using Data Management Methodologies to Foster Development of Transformational AI/ML Tradecraft
Time: 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Description: Data science methods provide a means to establish analytic tradecraft, capable of managing a large amount of data, allowing for full characterization of actor behaviors, and providing valuable insights. As data volume increases, AI/ ML plays a significant role in this "high data entropy" space, providing users with the means to combine multi-sourced datasets, with the goal of learning and identifying patterns, and develop actionable insights while assuring they follow the organization’s law and policy boundaries. Rodriquez presents a case study on how the intelligence community (IC) is addressing these challenges by establishing innovative AI/ML governance and data management methodologies, supporting the development of a policy-compliant AI governance ecosystem, predicating strategies to enforce legal and policy considerations, and establishing data controls.
12:00 PM
Modern Data Strategy Essentials Today
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Ruben Ugarte, Decision Strategist, Practico Analytics Matthew J. Holbrook, Director, Enterprise Data, Analytics and Architecture, The MEMIC Group
Description: We’re all looking for insights that can be gleaned from our data. In addition to being data-driven, consider being insights-driven
Title: Unlocking More Insights Through Better Decisions
Time: 12:00 PM - 12:30 PM
Description: Collecting more data doesn't always translate into better business outcomes. The best companies are shifting their entire culture to obsess about generating more insights that can be turned into tangible results in profits, revenue, and growth. Ugarte shares strategies for how teams can start to make the shift to being insights-driven and how to turn those insights into profitable decisions. Learn how to determine the ROI of your data and why more insights are the key to increasing the value of data. Look at your decisions as a process instead of one-off and start optimizing this internal process. Connect the dots in how data becomes an insight and then into a winning decision.
Title: Simplified Data Modernization: The MEMIC Experience
Time: 12:30 PM - 12:45 PM
Description: The MEMIC Group was no different from others in that it was dealing with a fragmented data ecosystem, from data in the cloud, in the enterprise data warehouse (EDW), and in multiple application databases and files. As a result, it was difficult to access, analyze, and manage data. Holbrook discusses how MEMIC modernized its data architecture to empower business users to connect to a single location to gain real-time access to quality data and provided the security team with a centralized point to monitor and manage all data access.
What’s Next in Data & Analytics Architecture
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Modern data architectures optimize for quick delivery at scale.
Title: Unifying Data & Models for Cross-Domain Personalized Fashion Recommendations
Time: 12:00 PM - 12:30 PM
Description: Zielnicki explores how Stitch Fix evolved its large suite of recommender models into a novel model architecture that unifies data from client interactions to deliver a holistic and real-time understanding of their style preferences. Stitch Fix’s Client Time Series Model (CTSM) is a scalable and flexible sequence-based recommender system that models client preferences over time, based on event data from various sources, to provide multi-domain, channel-specific recommendation outputs. The model has enabled Stitch Fix to continuously provide personalized fashion at scale, like no other apparel retailer.
Title: Sipping Mai Tais & Surfing Data: How Holiday Inn Club Streamlined Reporting & Analytics
Time: 12:30 PM - 12:45 PM
Description: Johnson shares how Holiday Inn Club is serving its customers with more reliable, up-to-date access to Salesforce data. Learn how Holiday Inn Club took just 2 weeks to build automated data integration pipelines that support organizational growth and better surface massive volumes of transactional data in Azure and SQL Server warehouses for holistic reporting.
Data Mesh & Data Fabric Boot Camp
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Enable your data team to get the most value from their time and quickly deliver needed business insights through a next-generation data fabric methodology.
Title: Next-Generation Data Fabric Methodology
Time: 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
Description: MacWilliams introduces a technology agnostic methodology that solves the common challenges facing data teams and focuses on the processes among technologies—on-board data faster, flex automatically when data changes, create solutions that are manageable across technologies, and provide the foundation to be able to monitor and maintain your data fabric for the future. The methodology integrates with already existing technologies. Starting with the end in mind, MacWilliams covers how to best monitor and maintain your platform, how to maximize data team capacity, how to utilize meta-data to streamline your team’s development, and where to build custom and leverage modern technologies.
AI & Machine Learning Summit
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: MLOps can streamline ML development, thus increasing operational effectiveness.
Title: Building MLOps Organizations for Scale
Time: 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
Description: Jablonski looks at the journey to defining and implementing an MLOps solution for your organization. Jablonski begins with the metrics necessary for successful model lifecycle measurement, then discusses the technology stack to be deployed and the operational model necessary for success at scale. These three must all be defined and built collectively to ensure alignment between operational needs, technology capabilities, and success metrics. High model performance, elimination of bias, and predictability are all key elements of an MLOps strategy.
2:00 PM
Modern Data Strategy Essentials Today
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Richard Huffine, Assistant Director, Enterprise Information & Records, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
Description: A key point about succeeding with digital transformation involves obtaining commercial data services and utilizing their capabilities to the fullest.
Title: Intricacies of Acquiring Data Services
Time: 2:00 PM - 2:45 PM
Description: Acquiring commercial data services is not as simple as signing a standard contract without a preliminary and thorough investigation and an understanding of how to broker, evaluate, and integrate the data into a corporate or governmental data lake, data warehouse, or data mesh. Huffine calls your attention to the complexities of licensing, negotiations, usage, and ROI. Additionally, he covers environmental, financial, and core data (ZIP codes, GIS layers, etc.) as well as use cases for modeling, dashboards, research, and regulatory activities.
What’s Next in Data & Analytics Architecture
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Andy Vidan, CEO & Co-Founder, Composable Analytics, Inc. Geoff Rennie, Master Pre-Sales Engineer, Data Protector, OpenText
Description: DataOps affects everyone involved in the data ecosystem, which pretty much encompasses all employees, so adopting a strategy for agile data delivery is important.
Title: Composable Design Patterns
Time: 2:00 PM - 2:30 PM
Description: Industry publications and thought leaders have been touting the benefits of composable design for both business and architecture. For roughly 10 years, Composable Analytics has been ahead of that curve. We were founded on using composable design strategies to get actual projects up and running and providing value for clients. Vidan shares some of the real-world lessons learned over that time and explores some of the more common usage patterns that Composable Analytics has found that help put theory to practice and composable architecture into production.
Title: Recovery From a Data Emergency
Time: 2:30 PM - 2:45 PM
Description: Learn more about ransomware and the different options to recover your data. During this presentation we will discuss the following: whether to copy, replicate, mirror, image and or back-up your data; the different data recovery options; the advantages and disadvantages of each option; when to use and when to avoid them.
Data Mesh & Data Fabric Boot Camp
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Moving to the cloud is now a normal function but presents interesting new challenges.
Title: Why Operationalizing Data Mesh Is Critical for Operating in the Cloud
Time: 2:00 PM - 2:30 PM
Description: As companies look to scale, they face new and unique challenges related to data management in the cloud. Data mesh offers a framework and a set of principles that companies can adopt to help them scale a well-managed cloud data ecosystem. Learn how Capital One approached scaling its data ecosystem by federating data governance responsibility to data product owners within their lines of business and hear how companies can operate more efficiently by combining centralized tooling and policy with federated data management responsibility.
Title: Achieve Better Data Quality With Data Warehouse Observability
Time: 2:30 PM - 2:45 PM
Description: Making sense of all your input data isn’t fun, especially when consuming inputs from 10s to 1,000s of data sources daily. If your data teams are orchestrating massive amounts of data across multiple data pipelines, it’s nearly impossible to feel confident in the data quality within your data warehouse. Instead of retroactive data monitoring, it’s time for a more proactive approach to ensure better data quality for your warehouse.
AI & Machine Learning Summit
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Neural networks can be used for many applications in the world of Artificial Intelligence.
Title: Putting ChatGPT, LLMs, and Generative AI to Work
Time: 2:00 PM - 2:45 PM
Description: ChatGPT, Large Language Models (LLMs), and generative AI have captured the attention of people worldwide. As these tools, many based on neural networks, move from experimental lab projects to widespread usage by the general public, questions arise about their business applications. Can these tools be fine-tuned to enhance competitive intelligence and find insights into customer behavior? How do they aid in answering product marketing questions, monitoring competitor strategies, and influencing decision making? What competitive edge can these AI-based tools provide to you?
3:15 PM
Modern Data Strategy Essentials Today
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Some data is meant to be shared, but other data requires being secured so it doesn’t get into the wrong hands.
Title: Own Your Data: Key Issues for Contracts
Time: 3:15 PM - 3:45 PM
Description: One of the biggest concerns of small, middle-sized, and enterprise companies involves securing data and ensuring integrity when collaborating or integrating with other services. Seasoned executives know that issues of IT security, compliance, regulations, cyber liability insurance, supply chain requirements, incident response, and forensics should all be addressed in the contracts. However, it is easier to identify contractual protections than to obtain them. Agreeing to contractual commitments is a function of both liability to the enterprise and negotiating leverage.
Title: Zero Trust Database Access & Management With DBHawk
Time: 3:45 PM - 4:00 PM
Description: With Datasparc's flagship product DBHawk, users receive zero trust database access to the data they need. Find out how DBHawk provides secure password-less access to on-premise and cloud databases.
What’s Next in Data & Analytics Architecture
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Andy Li, Senior Software Engineer
Description: Tools to collect, organize, store, and analyze data are part of a modern data stack that can transform data.
Title: Crafting a Stack for the Evolving Data Landscape
Time: 3:15 PM - 4:00 PM
Description: As the data landscape continues to evolve, data usage has transformed from humble beginnings in recordkeeping to a strategic asset that powers key business decisions, customer experiences, developer toolchains, AI platforms, and more. This transformation has influenced the design and implementation of modern data stacks. Li explores technologies that underpin modern data infrastructure, including Presto and Apache Pinot, explaining their ability to process federated, real-time data at scale. Using real-world use cases, he highlights practical considerations for crafting a stack that can handle the diverse and complex data needs of modern businesses.
Data Mesh & Data Fabric Boot Camp
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: New technologies can transform companies’ data journeys.
Title: Data Fabric or Data Mesh? Find the Happy Medium
Time: 3:15 PM - 4:00 PM
Description: Data fabrics and data meshes are promising paradigms for helping organizations on their data journeys. Data fabric is a new approach complementing the existing infrastructure and data management technology, accessing the data on demand as it’s needed by the consumers of the data, with centralized metadata and governance. Data mesh accesses the data on demand, providing the metadata and governance capabilities at the edges of the organization, where the data resides, enabling agility and autonomy throughout the organization. While much of the conversation around data fabrics and data mesh has been primarily about which approach or architecture is “better,” Fried discusses how the real value of these concepts isn’t rooted in an “either/or” approach and why they must be viewed as complementary.
AI & Machine Learning Summit
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Knowledge graph technology expands by employing neural networks.
Title: Build Predictions With Machine Learning & Graph Neural Networks
Time: 3:15 PM - 4:00 PM
Description: Probably the most important reason for building knowledge graphs has been to answer this age-old question: “What is going to happen next?” Given the data, relationships, and timelines we know about a customer, patient, product, etc. (“the entity of interest”), how can we confidently predict the most likely next event? Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a mature AI approach for knowledge graph enrichment. GNNs enhance neural network methods by processing graph data through rounds of message passing. Aasman describes how to use graph embeddings and regular recurrent neural networks to predict events via GNNs and demonstrates creating a GNN in the context of a knowledge graph for building event predictions.
4:15 PM
Modern Data Strategy Essentials Today
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Michael Corey, Co-Founder/Chief Operating Officer, LicenseFortress Don Sullivan, Product Line Manager, Broadcom (VMware)
Description: Challenges in licensing compliance have not diminished; in fact, they are more challenging than ever.
Title: Stealth Audits & Other Trends in Software Licensing Compliance
Time: 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM
Description: Unisphere’s report, “Managing the Software Audit: 2022 Survey on Enterprise Software Licensing and Audits Trends,” surmised that, due to lost revenue as a direct result of COVID-19, major software vendors increased the pace of their software licensing audits to generate additional revenue. Your risk of a software audit is greater now than at any point in time. Corey and Sullivan discuss the significant findings of the survey and explore the stealth audit, the newest tool in the vendor audit toolbox. They explain the difference between vendor policy and contractual obligation and expose how software licensing trolls have weaponized software vendor audits. Don’t be the next victim!
What’s Next in Data & Analytics Architecture
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Putting data first rather than taking an application-centric approach is the mark of a modern data architecture.
Title: Solving Complex Data Problems by Treating Data as a Supply Chain
Time: 4:15 PM - 4:45 PM
Description: Emerging modern business-oriented data architectures such as data hub, data lake house, data fabric, and knowledge graphs put data first. By treating data as a supply chain, from which applications hang, as opposed to traditional application-centric approaches, where data is suborned into silos, Bentley explains how to solve complex data problems simply. Data unity, data security, data governance, data context, and data quality are all ensured throughout the data lifecycle without the complexity of multiple integrations from multiple vendors and components. Through real-world case studies, Bentley highlights the advantages of this approach, lessons learned, and practical advice in implementing these modern architectures that augment your existing data ecosystem without the need for “rip and replace.”
Title: Data Testing: A Left-Shift Approach to Data Quality
Time: 4:45 PM - 5:00 PM
Description: While data quality tools find issues in production, it is too little, too late. Production data issues are expensive to fix and cause business discontinuity and reputation risk. iceDQ believes companies should adopt a left-shift approach to prevent faulty processes and data from entering production.
Data Mesh & Data Fabric Boot Camp
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Elliott Cordo, CEO/Founder/Builder, Data Futures, LLC
Description: Data architectures tend not to be static and new approaches are always welcome.
Title: Enabling Data Mesh With Event-Driven Data Architecture
Time: 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM
Description: The concept of data mesh has resonated strongly with both data professionals and the broader engineering community. Loose coupling, enablement of federated development, and data sharing ease the difficulty of data management in both large and small organizations, as well as bringing data systems closer to parity with modern microservice-based systems. Cordo explores how the adoption of an event-based data architecture can enable an organization's sustainable transition to data mesh. This includes an overview of event-based architecture, architectural patterns for event-based data systems, and organizational considerations.
AI & Machine Learning Summit
Length: 45 Minutes