Finally a large event about Big Data was held in the Netherlands

16 Mar Finally a large event about Big Data was held in the Netherlands

Thursday the 12^th of March was the first time a large meeting about Big Data was held in the Netherlands. About time in our opinion, because Big Data is a subject lots of people are interested in, as it affects many areas of interest for the foreseeable future and beyond. These Big Data events are already popular in Germany bye the way, specifically in Berlin. The event was hosted by Impacthub, a community for social entrepreneurs nicely located in the buzzing Westerpark area, and organized by Dataconomy, an online community for everybody interested in Big Data. Holland FinTech sat front-row to learn more.

But what is Big Data exactly? Opinions differ, we use for the sake of simplicity Wikipedia’s definition: Big data is a broad term for data sets so large or complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate. Challenges include analysis, capture, curation, search, sharing, storage, transfer, visualization, and information privacy. The term often refers simply to the use of predictive analytics or other certain advanced methods to extract value from data, and seldom to a particular size of data set. Many fintech start-ups use Big Data for analysis and decision making purposes.

3 key speakers were invited to the event to share their thoughts about Big Data.

First on stage was Jay de Groot, CEO of Science Rockstars. He has a long history in multivariate testing at several of his former employers, to discover that almost all these tests lacked predictive power. Predictive power is the holy grail; you would like to accurately forecast the future based on a smart analysis of historical data. In 2007 he stumbled upon the role of psychology in predicting human behavior. Science Rockstars dubs this the ‘persuasion profile’. In other words, factor in EQ besides only IQ. For more information go to their website.

Then Lars Trieloff entered the stage, he is a high-profile product manager from Germany and a gifted speaker. To his surprise, many decisions made by management teams all around the world are hardly based on real quantitative data, or facts for that matter. What’s more, in most occasions they stall or even forgo a decision, which is a decision by itself. That’s odd, given Maslow’s hierarchy of needs with a Big Data twist: collection -> storage -> analysis -> prediction -> decision. So in the end, a decision has to be made. And if you make one, base it on real and validated data. As for start-ups, Lars Trieloff thinks most of their business plans will be in the line of ‘take (existing) X and add some artificial intelligence’.

We noticed that the speakers opinions were at odds with eachother; the first lectured about applying psychological features rather than just quantitative data, and the latter was actually promoting a heavier use of quantitative data in decision making.

But the 3^rd speaker was the most interesting one; Francisco Webber from cortical.io. This is a start-up from Vienna that is developing a very innovative language recognition technology they call ‘semantic fingerprinting’. The challenge is that computers are good with numbers but not with language, so there’s an urgent need for technology that can fix this problem. Cortical’s technology is too complex to explain in just a few sentences (go to their website for a thorough explanation), but it appears to be a groundbreaking innovation as far as we can see. The application fields seem endless, here are a few to get the idea: profile matching, search engines, opinion mining, information discovery, etc.

After the official program the visitors got the opportunity to connect. There was a fairly big crowd, so we think - and hope - this event won’t be the last one about Big Data, because the implications for Fintech are huge. We at Holland Fintech will keep you updated.

written by Sujan Lahiri, research consultant at Holland FinTech