Big Data in Finance Day Chicago (September 18, 2012)
Personal notes from Big Data in Finance Day Chicago that I recently attended at Microsoft Technology Center Chicago. In speaking with event organizer and Fountainhead owner Andrew "Shep" Sheppard (a self-described quant by day and meetup organizer by night), following the last session, he mentioned that the first Big Data in Finance Day was held in New York City on March 26, 2012, and elaborated on his plans by indicating that the next conferences in this series will be held in Boston and London.
After finding out about this conference through Chicago Big Data, I offered to do a write-up about the conference on my blog, similar in spirit to the one I had posted following my attendance at BigDataCamp Chicago, in exchange for fees being waived, so I attended all 14 sessions of this marathon day-long event. By the time mid-afternoon came around, a number of attendees had already left, but I am glad that I held out, as one of the best sessions of the day, led by Dr. Phil Shelley, CTO of Sears Holdings and CEO of MetaScale, occurred late in the day.
The alternate name for this event was Hadoop in Finance Day Chicago. It will not take long for anyone in the Big Data space to realize that a summoning of the open source Apache Hadoop product is often performed alongside mentions of Big Data because of its ubiquitous influence in projects of this genre, as well as its ubiquitous presence in commercial products in this space. While most of the sessions included Hadoop discussions, working with Big Data goes beyond what any one product can solve, and so the number of topics was broad.