Your Online Big Data Summer School

Summer is the perfect period for catching up on knowledge and insight. You are not bothered by the rat race of everyday life so you can devote substantial amounts of time to the topics you need to get more familiar with. Let’s start with a sick joke: do you know what happened to the 2013 Big Data Summer Institute sponsored by Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology? It was cancelled due to low enrollment numbers! A week long Big Data Summer Course including in-class instruction by leading experts covering tools such as MapReduce, Hadoop, Mahout, and R that never came about. I simply could not believe my eyes! The explanation must be that people rather want to educate themselves online these days. Therefore I selected  ESCW13, this year’s Extended Semantic Web Conference, aka Summer School 2013, more in particular the following 15 video interviews (20-50 minutes long) with prominent Big Data experts, including the Vice Presidents, Founders and CEOs of a number of main players as well as a number of leading academics in the area: – Alon Halevy, Research Scientist at Google – Jeni Tennison, Technical Director of the Open Data Institute – Usman Haque, Pachube Founder and Director Urban Projects Division COSM – Prasanna Lal Das, Lead Program Officer Controllers World Bank – Hjalmar Gislason, Founder of DataMarket.com – Andraz Tori, Founder and CTO of Zemanta – Jim Webber, Chief Scientist at Neo – Francois Bancilhon, CEO of Data Publica – Richard Benjamins, Director Business Intelligence Telefónica Digital – Frank van Harmelen, Professor in AI at the Free University of Amsterdam – Alek Kolcz, Research Scientist at Twitter – Sören Auer, Senior Scientist at the University of Leipzig – Jim Hendler, Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute – Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Yahoo! Research Labs – Bill Thompson, Head of Partnership Development BBC Archives ENJOY!