Tomorrow is going to be a big day for Big Data as the 2012 O’Reilly Strata Conference kicks off.  With a growing influence in computing and connectivity, Strata extends media access to new tools and technologies looking to monetize your data and make it work for your needs. SiliconANGLE will be there to bring the freshest episodes of the anticipated big data event. Watch live coverage, interviews and analysis via theCube. This three-day affair brings together practitioners, researchers, IT leaders and entrepreneurs, Hadoop, analytics, visualization and data markets and experts under one roof.

But first let’s take a moment to reminisce on the previous year’s event, and what to expect in the 2012 edition of this stellar conference.

2011 Strata Lookback

The success of the 2011 Strata Conference came from strong predictions and the ongoing discussions relating the big data revolution, driving the reinvention of an industry and the web. Data scientists at last year’s gathering represented the best of the best, looking at on how to make data work in the real world, particularly in its relevance to modernization and cloud adoption.

One of the highlights of this event showcased the Real World Applications Panel led by market pundits: Kenneth Cukier, Adam Hurwitz, Jinesh Varia and Mario Veiga Pereira. The Data Market‘s significance was touched on by Stratus Security’s Pete Soldering and BuzzData’s Pete Forde.

Aside from big data discussions, Strata 2011 also became a venue for product launches. The first ever Cassandra applications management and monitoring platform, DataStax OpsCenter for Apache Cassandra, was introduced here. Gnip capitalized on Twitter’s mounting followers and trends as they revealed Power Track service offering.

Topics for 2012

Sticking with the theme “making data work,” this year’s Strata Conference will center on discussions on various topics including data science, business and industry, visualization and interface, Hadoop and Big data, policy and privacy and domain data.

On day one, look for the Data science sessions to make sense of this trend as a whole, laying out basics of data and its value. This will anchor the whole conference, with focused areas on real world implementations, including an Introduction to Hadoop, facilitated by Cloudera’s Sarah Sproehnle, Large Scale Web Mining by Ken Krugler of Scale Unlimited, Introduction to R for Data Mining by Joseph Rickert of Revolution Analytics and Architecting Virtualized Infrastructure for Big Data by VMware’s Richard McDougall.

Virtualization will also be addressed, with Tableau Software’s Jock Mackinlay explaining the Science of Virtualization. Mano Marks and Chris Broadfoot of Google are also joining forces to discuss the beauty of geospatial technology.

Day 2 will feature applied sessions on Hadoop and big data. What the future holds for Hadoop and how it will set the trend at the enterprise-level will be discussed by Hortonwork’s Eric Baldeschwieler. LinkedIn’s Sam Shah will lead attendees on collaborative filtering with the use of MapReduce while Stefan Groschupf will lecture on financial services of Hadoop Analytics.  Jason Williamson of Oracle will speak on business strategies and tips for big data.

Issues on policies and privacy are likely to draw some serious attention on day three of Strata.  O’Reilly Media’s very own Alexander Howard is set to touch on the various complexities and laws encompassing data access, and the rising threats to the industry’s growth.

Highlights

Strata has set the stage for larger-than-life technological announcements and launches these past few years. Days before the actual event, several organizations have already broadcasted what to watch out for. President and CEO of Heritage Provider Network, Dr. Richard Merkin will name the $80,000 Progress Prize Winners in the $3M Heritage Health Prize Competition. This contest challenges participants’ predictive modeling expertise to create an algorithm to forecast how many days will a patient spend in the hospital.

How to use Hadoop will be Ted Dunning of MapR Technologies topic to present in Strata Conference. On Day 2, he will show tricks of the trade on how algorithms work for small and big data. In an interview, Dunning noted:

“Data is growing faster than Moore’s law and the corresponding paradigm shift in data architectures is completely reshaping data centers. Today, Big Data frameworks are being used by organizations to handle fast-growing data with unprecedented scalability at a fraction of the cost. This session will cover the recent developments that make Hadoop access available to users.”

HPCC Systems will also partake in Big Data keynotes as they address big data challenges for enterprises and what integrated solutions, discovery and analytics could mean to a business. Another contender on the big data arena is Digital Reasoning, a leading unstructured data analytics firm. CEO Tim Estes will demonstrate automated understanding for Big Data.