8:45 AM
Keynotes
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Doug Laney, Innovation Fellow, West MonroeDescription: IT and business executives frequently talk about information as one of their most important assets. But few behave as if it is. Even today, executives report on their financials, their customers, and their partnerships, but rarely the health of their data assets. And corporations typically exhibit greater discipline in managing and accounting for their office furniture than their data. The arrival of generative AI (GenAI) is sparking a discussion of how to adopt AI in measuring, monetizing, and managing data assets. Laney shares insights from his best-selling book, Infonomics, about how organizations can actually treat information as an actual enterprise asset. He discusses why data both is and isn’t an asset and property and what this means to organizations—particularly as they prepare to put AI to work broadly. He also covers well-honed approaches to and examples of organizations managing, monetizing, and measuring their data assets.
10:45 AM
Modern Data Strategy Essentials Today
Length: 1 Hour
Description: Important to an overall data strategy is management and governance of data assets.
Title: How to Create, Govern, & Manage Data Products: Practices & Products You Need to Know
Time: 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Description: Data products promise to deliver high-quality datasets to business users on demand, fostering greater trust in data and higher levels of empowerment and self-service. But many companies struggle to understand not only what data products are, but how to create, govern, and manage them. Thought leader Eckerson dives into the practical implications of running an organization using data products, describing how a data product is different from a data asset and how to create data products from data assets using a variety of tools and techniques. He addresses organizational, architectural, and process considerations for delivering data products at scale.
What’s Next in Data & Analytics Architecture
Length: 1 Hour
Description: One important aspect, when moving to a modern data architecture, is an equally modern approach to data governance.
Title: Data Governance Begins With Data Architecture
Time: 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Description: One of the challenges facing enterprise architecture is maintaining consistency across the enterprise. This is complicated by the fact that data comes from numerous disparate sources and systems that represent different purposes, focuses, and objectives. On top of that, there is considerable confusion as to terms such as data lake, data warehouse, and operational data store. To overcome these challenges at an enterprise level, a framework is necessary to apply data uniformly, consistently, and in a meaningful manner. The framework will transform data from multiple, disparate sources of data into an operational data store, a consistent, homogeneous environment, as the single dependable source of truth for all reporting and analytics.
Title: Data Frenzy to Data Freedom: How Centralized Data Powers Modern-Day Data Analytics & AI
Time: 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Description: In today’s modern, data-rich environment, companies face the challenge of centralizing large volumes of diverse data to drive insights and operational efficiency. Without a comprehensive data centralization strategy, organizations risk missing out on significant opportunities for revenue growth and competitive advantages with data trapped in silos. By freeing data from silos and establishing a single source of truth, companies can accelerate their innovation to stay competitive.
Data Mesh & Data Fabric Boot Camp
Length: 1 Hour
Speaker(s):
Efrain Rodriquez, Director, U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Mary Vue, VP, Marketing and Partnerships, SyncariDescription: Using data mesh to improve decision-making involves accelerating the adoption of many data elements.
Title: From Boardroom to Battlefield: Accelerating Adoption of Data, Analytics, & AI Using Data Mesh
Time: 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Description: The Department of Defense (DoD) initiated efforts toward advancing the agency's goal to improve decision making across all DoD entities. This goal rests under the foundational principle of accelerating DoD's adoption of data, analytics, and AI by prepositioning a common frame of reference for all DoD entities to converge and share data and AI models. Under the auspices of the DoD Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO), this effort will create an enterprise-level infrastructure of services intended to drive an integrated data, analytics, and AI strategy, while maturing a responsible DoD-wide AI ecosystem. This presentation highlights the case study on DoD’s efforts to establish a data mesh construct based on the following four elements: domain-oriented/decentralized data ownership and architecture, data as a product, self-service data infrastructure as a platform, and federated computational governance.
Title: Data Fabric Realized Sooner Than You Think
Time: 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Description: Advancements in data automation, low-code/no-code platforms, and APIs make it quicker and easier for organizations to start their data fabric projects, often in just a few months. Learn how these advancements enable smoother integration and management of data across the enterprise, leading to faster decision making, efficiency, AI readiness, and increased profits. Discover how leveraging data automation can accelerate your data fabric strategy so your data is more effectively fueling significant growth and sparking innovation.
AI & Machine Learning Summit
Length: 1 Hour
Speaker(s):
Kjell Carlsson, Head of AI Strategy, Domino Data Labs Clive Smith, Chief Revenue Officer, Datavid Limited Tim Padilla, Director, Sales & Consulting North America, Datavid LimitedDescription: Generative AI (GenAI) is all the rage these days, but finding effective and realistic uses for it is still elusive.
Title: Shatter the Seven Myths of GenAI to Operationalize Impact
Time: 10:45 AM - 11:15 AM
Description: The vast majority of current GenAI projects will fail, not because of inherent flaws in large language models (LLMs), but because of misconceptions about how to use them and the lack of capabilities needed to successfully design, develop, and operationalize GenAI-driven applications. Carlsson debunks the most harmful myths that set up projects for failure and looks at case studies of how advanced AI teams in industries ranging from pharma to food delivery are shattering these myths and delivering transformative outcomes.
Title: Integrating LLMs With a Private Knowledge Platform
Time: 11:30 AM - 11:45 AM
Description: In this era where AI is reshaping industries, the integration of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT with private knowledge platforms is a groundbreaking development. Datavid shares experiences and lessons learned from both internal R&D and the benchmarking of several LLMs with customers and subsequent integration with existing KM platforms. Deep dive into the synergistic potential of combining the advanced natural language processing capabilities of LLMs with the rich, domain-specific data housed in private knowledge platforms. Come explore how this integration can revolutionize AI applications in your industry!
12:00 PM
Modern Data Strategy Essentials Today
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Looking at data strategy, a number of elements combine to inform strategic decisions, including repositories and data products.
Title: Get Better Analytics by Putting Less Data in Your Database
Time: 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
Description: A recent survey showed that 67% of companies had their software budgets cut during 2023. SaaS databases are easy to use and powerful, but they put a strain on budgets. Still, no one can afford to skimp on smart data analytics. How do you get more analytics out of your SaaS data warehouse/lakehouse, without spending more money? Treat incoming data streams as a graph. Relationships and categories of data can immediately be seen and acted upon. Duplicate entities can be resolved. Key pattern signals in noisy data streams can be pinpointed and the noise that you don’t need tossed out. By putting only relevant and clean data into analytical repositories, tons of useless data never have to be stored in pay-per-use systems, vastly reducing costs. You get smarter answers on clean, pre-filtered data in real time.
Title: Unveiling the Business Value of Data Products: A Paradigm Shift in Data Utilization
Time: 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
Description: In today's dynamic and data-centric business environment, organizations increasingly recognize the critical role of data products in extracting maximum value from their expansive data landscapes. This session explores what data products actually are beyond the buzzwords, why data products are becoming indispensable in data-driven business strategies, and what the best practices are for adopting data products. Join Denodo to better understand how data products can be a transformative approach in helping to democratize data access and revolutionize your decision-making processes.
What’s Next in Data & Analytics Architecture
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Timothy Spann, Principal Developer Advocate, ClouderaDescription: Real-time analytics contributes to building scalable and fault-tolerant data processing pipelines.
Title: Building Real-Time Pipelines With FLaNK
Time: 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
Description: The combination of Apache Flink, Apache NiFi, and Apache Kafka for building real-time data processing pipelines is extremely powerful, as demonstrated by this case study using the FLaNK-MTA project. The project leverages these technologies to process and analyze real-time data from the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). FLaNK-MTA demonstrates how to efficiently collect, transform, and analyze high-volume data streams, enabling timely insights and decision-making.
Data Mesh & Data Fabric Boot Camp
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: With the rise of generative AI (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs), the data fabric can add a range of new facilities to accelerate data democratization.
Title: Using Data Fabrics With GenAI to Automate Data Management
Time: 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
Description: The data fabric architecture has been steadily gaining traction in the enterprise to unify data across disparate sources into coherent data services. By leveraging the power of GenAI models in conjunction with smart data fabrics, organizations can automate the integration of data, provide natural language access to data and analytics, improve data quality while decreasing the need for labor-intensive data cleansing, and secure and govern data in real time. Fried explores the benefits of using data fabrics and GenAI to improve data management practices and provides examples of how these technologies can be used in real-world scenarios. He also notes the risks and lays out a practical path for applying this technology safely.
AI & Machine Learning Summit
Length: 45 Minutes
Title: Exploring the Interconnected World of Logistic Regression, Neural Networks, & Computer Vision
Time: 12:00 PM - 12:30 PM
Description: Chen explores the inherent connection among logistic regression, neural networks, and computer vision using mathematical structures as a lens. Drawing parallels between the construction of logistic regression functions and mathematical representations uncovers the foundational role of abstract mathematical concepts in shaping these methodologies. In logistic regression, the linear function, dynamically shaped by a combination of various features, emerges as a visual metaphor—a plane in the mathematical fabric. In neural networks, weights and nodes form a space surrounded by multidimensional planes, aligning closely with mathematical principles. In computer vision, filters function as weighted combinations of pixel features, extending the mathematical concept to image processing. This presentation illuminates the harmony and shared essence of mathematical principles across diverse machine learning and computer vision paradigms.
Title: Vector Databases: Innovating Data Management in the AI Era
Time: 12:30 PM - 12:45 PM
Description: In the rapidly evolving landscape of AI, the ability to efficiently handle and process vast amounts of complex data is paramount. Vector databases and vector search have emerged as critical components in this domain, offering a specialized approach to managing multidimensional datapoints, or vectors, that are essential for advanced AI applications. Agarwal gives a comprehensive exploration of vector databases, their role in AI solutions, and the emerging trends and technologies that are shaping their development.
2:00 PM
Modern Data Strategy Essentials Today
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Hugh Thai, Head, Innovation & Data Science, Arbella Insurance Group Bill Morrissey, Sr. IT Manager, Arbella Insurance GroupDescription: As organizations concentrate on being data-driven, let’s not forget the importance of becoming insights-driven as well.
Title: Charting a New Course: The Essential Guide to Insights-Driven Transformation
Time: 2:00 PM - 2:45 PM
Description: As the digital landscape evolves at an unprecedented pace, the ability to leverage data for strategic decision making has become essential for staying competitive and innovative. Thai provides a road map for harnessing the power of data and analytics to drive business success and examines the key components of becoming an insight-driven decision organization. Included are building robust data infrastructure, fostering a culture that values data literacy and insights, and implementing tools and technologies for data analytics and interpretation. Finally, he looks ahead at emerging trends and future possibilities in the realm of business insights and analytics.
What’s Next in Data & Analytics Architecture
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Finding needed data requires more than a user-friendly interface, it needs good metadata and innovative uses of LLMs.
Title: Navigating the Data Jungle: Strategies for Effective Data Discovery
Time: 2:00 PM - 2:45 PM
Description: In the contemporary data-driven landscape, businesses are inundated with vast amounts of data, necessitating sophisticated data management strategies. However, complexities arise in data management, particularly in large-scale environments. Key challenges include tracing data lineage, determining data freshness, identifying personally identifiable information (PII), and locating responsible data custodians, especially in scenarios where ownership is ambiguous due to staff turnover or lack of clear accountability. This presentation delves into the methodologies employed to integrate metadata into Acryl and explores the innovative use of large language models (LLMs) in responding to natural language queries about data. Knowledge graphs, in conjunction with LLMs, facilitate complex inquiries related to data discovery, thereby advancing our data discovering capabilities.
Data Mesh & Data Fabric Boot Camp
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Elliott Cordo, CEO/Founder/Builder, Data Futures, LLCDescription: Data mesh is evolving due to changes in data architecture and technological advances.
Title: From Daunting to Doable: The Evolution of Data Mesh
Time: 2:00 PM - 2:45 PM
Description: There is no doubt that data mesh principles resonate with so many data professionals, particularly those looking to move beyond brittle, monolithic architecture. However, adopting data mesh can seem daunting, due to both a scarce but improving ecosystem of tools, as well as organizational change management. Luckily, data mesh lends itself to evolutionary adoption, helping organizations to leverage existing platform investment and gain incremental value. Cordo reviews architectures and best practices from real-world experience, grounded by the stories of two organizations.
AI & Machine Learning Summit
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: A well-known drawback to using generative AI (GenAI) is its tendency to produce false information.
Title: Strategies to Mitigate Hallucinations in LLMs
Time: 2:00 PM - 2:45 PM
Description: A crucial aspect of constructing and applying GenAI for enterprise-level applications is mitigating hallucinations. The generation of factually inaccurate information can occur both during the initial development of large language models (LLM s)and the subsequent refinement of existing model responses through prompt engineering. Bhattacharya explores diverse approaches to mitigate these issues, including the introduction of new decoding strategies, optimizations based on knowledge graphs, the incorporation of innovative components in loss functions, and supervised fine-tuning. She also addresses methods such as retrieval augmentation, feedback-based strategies, and prompt tuning, which can be implemented during the prompt engineering phase.
Title: Is Your Data Ready for AI?
Time: 2:00 PM - 2:45 PM
Description: AI has the power to help your organization disrupt, innovate, generate faster insights, cut costs, and increase productivity. But responsible and successful AI use demands high-quality, trusted data and transparent, observed, and accessible data intelligence. See firsthand how taking a model-to-marketplace approach to managing and leveraging your organization's data can help you gain the footing needed to get the AI results you desire.
3:15 PM
Modern Data Strategy Essentials Today
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Jeffrey Giles, Principal Architect, Sandhill ConsultantsDescription: Many elements of datasets need to be considered when creating data products that are effective.
Title: Empowering Data Excellence: Leveraging Quest IM Solutions Within a Unified Data Management Framework.
Time: 3:15 PM - 4:00 PM
Description: In today's digital landscape, data is key to decision making and planning. Sandhill Consultants, a certified Quest partner, leads in integrating data management practices. Our approach unifies data modeling, governance, catalogs, and operations and follows industry standards. Giles introduces the audience to the transformative potential of Quest IM Solutions for data management and showcases how the partnership not only accelerates the delivery of trusted data assets, but also optimizes business strategies through enhanced data governance, management, and utilization.
What’s Next in Data & Analytics Architecture
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Infosec teams and data teams are naturally at odds because they have competing agendas, but there are ways to meet the needs of both without compromising the requirements of either.
Title: Can’t We All Get Along? Effectively Managing the Demands of InfoSec Teams & Data Teams About Sensitive Data
Time: 3:15 PM - 4:00 PM
Description: In today's digital world, the integration of data governance and data security is critical. Security threats continue to evolve, while the sources and end points of an organization’s data continue to grow exponentially. For organizations to gain rapid access to usable data, they must first prioritize fostering a healthy relationship between their data governance and infosec teams. The chief data officer and chief information security officer approach data with the same end goal in mind, but often with different tooling and systems. The rise of SaaS-based automation and simplified data tools are paving the way to unified security and governance efforts to provide a common language and framework for CISOs and CDOs to join together in a united force.
Data Mesh & Data Fabric Boot Camp
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: New technologies can solve organizations’ operational problems.
Title: Unlocking Data Agility; Powering Data Fabric Architectures
Time: 3:15 PM - 4:00 PM
Description: In this session, Bagnall explores ETL's role in seamlessly integrating with data fabric architectures to empower organizations with the ability to efficiently manage, integrate, and analyze their data from diverse sources. He delves into real-world use cases, best practices, and the key features that make any ETL process a valuable ally in your journey toward a more agile and unified data ecosystem.
AI & Machine Learning Summit
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: The vector database has fast emerged as a preferred platform for GenAI applications.
Title: Whither the Vector Database? Why & How These New Platforms Support GenAI
Time: 3:15 PM - 4:00 PM
Description: While companies have long used vector databases to recognize patterns and support machine learning recommendation engines, now they are using them to support GenAI initiatives by storing, modeling, and searching tokenized data documents. Vector databases feed relevant content to language models (LMs), helping enrich prompts, fine-tune models, and govern outputs. Petrie defines vector databases and how they help companies boost productivity and gain competitive advantage with domain-specific GenAI initiatives. He looks at market requirements, adoption trends, challenges, benefits, use cases, and architectural approaches.
4:15 PM
Modern Data Strategy Essentials Today
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Designing a pragmatic approach to competing on analytics relies on using strong analytic methods to get the most out of your data.
Title: Let’s Get the Basics Right
Time: 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM
Description: Drawing on her 25 years of experience with data science, Chase lays out a simple, effective way to get the right analysis to drive your effective data-driven plans. She guides us through the TAP method using simple, understandable, and engaging examples. She brings to life the method for measuring all the various types of data organizations look at in experience management. Gain practical knowledge to accurately determine metrics, along with a new way of looking at your data.
Title: Introduction to MySQL HeatWave
Time: 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM
Description: MySQL HeatWave is a service that not only speeds up analytics on data stored in MySQL database, but also allows users to run analytics on data stored in an object store. Sundara covers key features of MySQL HeatWave, including some of the machine learning-based automation features offered.
What’s Next in Data & Analytics Architecture
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Ideas for saving time, enhancing data analytics, and adding business value begin with actual success stories.
Title: Navigating Data Harmony by Exploring the Power of Apache Iceberg
Time: 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM
Description: Explore the potential of Apache Iceberg in the world of structured data. Uncover its unique features, including schema evolution and ACID transactions, making it an ideal solution for large-scale datasets. See how Apache Iceberg seamlessly fits into your data architecture, providing flexibility, scalability, and top-notch performance for analytics and data warehousing. Steinkamp shares real-world success stories where organizations have saved time and supercharged their business value with Apache Iceberg. Delve into how it enhances data relationships and analytics, making structured datasets more insightful. Get ready for an insightful exploration, where practical insights, success stories, and strategies for leveraging Apache Iceberg in structured data management and analytics are shared.
Data Mesh & Data Fabric Boot Camp
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Data mesh plays a pivotal role within modern cloud architecture, while a semantic layer acts as a cohesive force within the data mesh framework.
Title: Unlocking the Power of Data With a Semantic Layer
Time: 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM
Description: Data mesh is swiftly gaining traction as an innovative strategy for expediting data and analytics advancements. It achieves this by distributing data product development through domain-oriented, self-service methods. Crucial to the success of this approach is the emergence of the semantic layer, serving as a foundational catalyst supporting composable model design, enhanced collaboration, and decentralized ownership. This enlightening session delves into the integral role of the semantic layer within a contemporary analytics architecture, elucidating its interconnectedness with the data mesh concept.
AI & Machine Learning Summit
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Models can be structured and designed in a variety of ways to enable them to provide valuable insights.
Title: Empowering AI Through Time Series Analysis
Time: 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM
Description: Time series analysis plays a crucial role in enhancing the capabilities of AI by providing valuable insights into temporal patterns, trends, and dependencies within datasets. Oad explores the synergies between time series analysis and AI, showcasing how the integration of temporal data can significantly improve the performance and accuracy of AI models. Key points to cover include temporal context in data, enhanced predictive modeling, improved anomaly detection, dynamic feature engineering, optimizing AI for time-varying data, forecasting and trend analysis.
