The Toronto bigdata event is on, and its primary aim is to unlock the potential of big data and optimise business performance. The Toronto big data conference will take place in June 14-15th, 2016. The 1000 plus attendees will get the chance to engage and network with big data professionals in Canada. From e-commerce, banking, telecommunications, transportation and retail, big data is changing the way we conduct business not only in Canada but the rest of the world.

With the ever expanding storage capacity and new data processing ways, big data analytics is creating a way for confident decision making in the corporate world. As a data-driven organisation, you get two days to engage with top content to gain a competitive advantage. The big data conference will also give you the opportunity to gather key business strategies to extract actionable insights, strengthen your customer relationship and optimise your processes.

In 2016, you can choose to attend the sessions that are crucial to your learning needs. For specialised tracks for business and technical use, the big data conference gives you an opportunity to gain the knowledge that you require for tackling your big data problems. Big data also gives you a chance to monetize the vast business potential that is dormant in your original data. You get to engage with the industry’s top big data innovators and source solutions that can be immediately applied in your organisation.

What is Big Data?

Big Data is an expression that is used to describe large volumes of data both unstructured and structured. The most essential thing in big data is not the quantity of data: it is what a company or an organisation does with the information that matters. Big data can be run through an analysis to lead to better decisions and strategic business moves.

Big data has been defined using the three Vs i.e. volume, velocity and variety. Volume, organisations collect data from many sources including social media, machine-to-machine data, and information from sensor devices. In the past, storage of the collected data was a significant concern but currently, new technologies have been developed to ease the burden. Velocity, data comes in at unprecedented speeds: therefore, data must be dealt in an organised and timely manner. For example, sensors, smart metering and RFID tags bring in large volumes of data that must be handled in real time. Variety, data comes in all types of formats from text documents to email, audio, video, and financial transactions. Variability and complexity should also be considered in the definition of big data.

Complexity, currently, data comes from different sources and this makes it difficult to match, link, transform and refine data across systems. It is also necessary to correlate and connect relationships, multiple data linkages and hierarchies or your collected data will spiral out of control. Variability, the flow of data can be inconsistent with period peaks. Seasonal data can be tricky to handle especially in unstructured data.

Big Data’s Potential: the amount of data that is being generated and stored globally is inconceivable and it keeps growing. This means that there is increased potential to gather critical business insights from the information: yet it is only a small percentage of data that is analysed.

Big data is important in today’s world: it is not about the amount of data you have but what you do with it. You can obtain data from any source and analyse it to come up with answers that enable cost and time reduction, new product development, optimised offerings and smart decision making. By combining big data with robust analytics, you can accomplish the following tasks. Establish the root causes of failures and defects in real-time, generate coupons at the point of sale by using the customer’s buying habits, a quick calculation of risk portfolios and detection of fraud in your organisation.

How to assist to the Big Data conference

With over 1000 attendees, the big data conference is an avenue for people to engage and come up with solutions in regards to big data. In attendance will be individuals and organisations from different parts of the world and everyone will have unique problems, challenges and solutions. How can I assist in the big data conference? First, register for the Toronto Big Data Conference and when the time comes, contribute. Your contribution in regards to challenges and solutions may be vital to solving some of the problems that arise in big data. You can also assist in the Toronto big data conference by speaking or teaching a class.

The Program of the Big Data Conference

The big data conference is where you want to be whether you are a market leader offering big data solutions or a start up with fresh ideas and solutions. On June 14th, the start of the conference at 9:30 AM, there will be inspirational keynotes and panels. Later, there will be a panel discussing how to recruit and train your big data A-team.

At 11:15 AM, people will attend either an intermediate or advanced classroom to learn big data management and big data technologies respectively. Panel 2 will then discuss big data and how it disrupts industries at 1:30 PM. An hour later, Keynote speech 2 will talk about Hadoop: at 2:30 its back to the classroom and the day will end with keynote address 3. June 15 will continue with the same programme but highlighting different issues like integrating computational social science, discussions on start-up panels, and customer experience among others.

Keynote speakers will include Richard Boire (Partner-Predictive Analytics) of the Boire-Filler Group, Mircea Baldean, founder of MeetVibe, Rebecca Pang (Senior Director, Channel Strategy and Analytics) CIBC. Others include Janice Liu (Head of Digital Personalisation and Campaign Optimisation) CIBC and Nick Necsulescu (Senior Manager, Digital Marketing) PC Financial.

Also check out my article on the Data Marketing conference in Toronto.