The Strata Conference brings together big data experts from an extremely broad range of sectors and industries. Many of those who’ll be attending next week’s gathering will make appearances in theCube, as they did in 2011, when SiliconAngle got the opportunity to visualize the massive scope of this trend from the data scientist’s point of view.

 Jeremy Howard is one of the techies that made an impression at Strata 2011, the president of a company called Kaggle. The startup works with NASA and other government agencies to develop predictive analytics algorithms to answer all kinds of questions, but it’s the way it does it that’s truly unique. Kaggle operates a crowdsourcing service that allows data scientists from all over the globe to challenge themselves and compete with their peers whenever a public entity comes up with a complex issue to tackle – in NASA’s case, measuring dark matter.

Sandy Steier, a former Wall Street analyst turned big data guru, also shared his perspective on analytics. Together with a colleague, Sandy Steier founded 1010data, a data software-as-a-service provider that has been since before the term was even coined. The firm hosts massive amounts of information for its clients, including Bank of America, J.P Morgan/Chase, and makes it easily accessible at remote locations.

Search was one of the big highlights at Strata 2011, and several pundits shared their vision for this particular technology segment. Bit.ly chief data scientist Hillary Mason says that search is outdated –  people want to extract more  knowledge from their content, and this could prove to be a golden opportunity for startups in the future. Tresata founder Abhishek Meht concurs.

In a separate interview, the former Bank of America data engineer called real-time search tomorrow’s “killer app,” and one that will reshape the industry.