Wayne State Big Data symposium to focus on pragmatics

Wayne State University’s third annual Big Data & Business Analytics Symposium, to be held March 23 and 24, 2016, will focus on practical and pragmatic business approaches to this trending field.

Participants in the symposium, which will be held in WSU’s Student Center, will examine case studies of Big Data deployment and use through the lens of concrete case studies.

Keynote speakers include Lawrence Weber, director of analytics platform services for IBM, and Paul Ballew, global chief data and analytics officer for Ford Motor Company. Filling the two-day program are dozens of speakers and panelists from leading multinational technology firms such as Amazon, Cleo, DataStax, GM, IBM, LexisNexis, LinkedIn and more.

Big Data is an overarching term for using and analyzing extremely large data sets to reveal patterns, trends and associations that are otherwise impossible to visualize or prove. The field is especially useful in analyzing human behavior, for example purchasing decisions in environments like manufacturing operations. Business analytics is the applied use of Big Data to solve problems or improve performance.

Wayne State is a leader in the study of Big Data, with its Big Data & Business Analytics Group comprising more than 30 faculty members and student researchers from the College of Engineering and the Mike Ilitch School of Business. The symposium was created to help companies and other data-intensive users navigate the new discipline and to inspire them to launch Big Data pilot projects.

The symposium features separate case study tracks on Big Data technology, analytics and business, as well as hands-on tutorials. There are a number of registration options available, including reduced rates for students.

Sponsors include IMB, DataFactZ, DataStax, Cloudera, LexisNexis, Cleo, MAPR, Oracle, SAS, Ironside and Ubiquiti.

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