13th SciFY Academy "Big data - From Infrastructure to Implementation"

13th SciFY Academy | Big data
"From Infrastructure to Implementation

On Wednesday, October 19th, SciFY, ELLAK and INNOVATHENS, organized the first seminar of this Academic year on Big Data. Up to 120 people attended the 13th SciFY Academy where Dr. Konstantinos Tsakalozos and Dr. George Giannakopoulos introduced us to the topic of Big Data.

The event was opened by Vassilis Giannakopoulos, Marketing Director & Impact Manager at SciFY, who presented the free and open source assistive technology platform Talk and Play. The project is being developed by SciFY with an exclusive donation from Stavros Niarchos Foundation. This prototype system allows people who have disabilities and also speech difficulties : to communicate, listen to music, watch movies and play tailored-made, specialized games that enhance their skills and can help them recover.

To access the presentation (in Greek) of Mr. Vasilis Giannakopoulos follow the link: http://go.scify.gr/sfacIN13PrVG

In the following session, Dr Konstantinos Tsakalozos, Software Developer - Big Data at Canonical Ltd., started by mentioning the origins of big data and reasons for using big data solution. Data increase as your activities expand. For instance as your business grows it produces increasingly more data. Also, nowadays it is easy to efficiently gather all these large amounts of data. The conventional processing methods, however, are not applicable for storing and processing this kind of data volume. Thus, it is necessary for you and your business to utilize big data technology, in order to process the continually increasing data, effectively. In turn, the generated knowledge will lead to better decision making.

Big Data Software solutions often tend to be complex, requiring staff training and overall are hard to integrate. What we really need, Mr. Tsakalozos informs us, is to lower the operational costs of modeling and implementing your big data solutions.

Mr. Tsakalozos presented the Juju platform from Canonical. Juju builds an ecosystem that enables easy setup and access to infrastructures, including big data systems. This ecosystem allows you to implement applications (charms) in any language (Puppet, Ansible, Bash, Python, Java); to take advantage of applications implemented by other vendors and to collaborate with other providers within the community. To access the presentation of Dr. Konstantinos Tsakalozos follow the link: http://go.scify.gr/sfacIN13PrKT

For more information about juju platform, see: 

• jujucharms.com/get-started 
• jujucharms.com/big-data 
• developer.juju.solutions

In the last session of the seminar, Dr. George Giannakopoulos, CTO at SciFY & Researcher at Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications of NCSR Demokritos, referred to the application of big data in a variety of cases, from social media analysis, to bioinformatics and wind turbine proactive maintenance! He stressed that “big data” is not only about “much” data, i.e. the volume is not their only distinctive feature. Other features of data, indicative of a problem of "big data" are also the speed of data change (velocity), the variety of forms and ways data are found (variety), the possibility of their validation (veracity) and the value generated by them, allowing action and reaction (value). Then, Mr. Giannakopoulos referred to the Big Data Europe Project [1], an international project funded by the EU, which brings 16 organizations from 10 European countries in a partnership for the future of "big data" in Europe. The 7 project development pilots are aligned with the societal challenges of the Horizon 2020 framework [2], covering domains such as: 1) Health, 2) Food & Agriculture, 3) Energy, 4) Transport, 5) Climate, 6) Social Sciences and 7) Security.

To access the presentation of Dr. George Giannakopoulos follow the link: http://go.scify.gr/sfacIN13PrGG

References:

[1]www.big-data-europe.eu

[2]http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/societal-challenges