Ιnitially, the event was opened by Mr. Vassilis Giannakopoulos, SciFY’s marketing director, who presented SciFY’s free and open-source assistive technology platform for people with disabilities, Talk and Play. This original system has been developed with the exclusive donation of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. It allows our fellow human beings who have both mobility and speech problems to communicate, listen to music, watch movies, and play games that strengthen their skills, helping hasten their rehabilitation.

You can find Mr. Vassilis Giannakopoulos’s presentation here: http://go.scify.gr/sfacIN13PrVG

Then, Dr. Konstantinos Tsakalozos took the floor. After speaking about the beginning of big data, he emphasized the reason why someone would work with big data. The data a business uses increases as it grows, and it is easy to accumulate a large amount of data. Conventional processing methods, however, do not apply to this type and size of data. Thus, businesses must take advantage of big data technology in order to process their ever-increasing data efficiently, producing knowledge that will lead to better operations.

There are solutions (Big Data Software) that are often complex. They require staff training and are not very easy to use. As Mr. Tsakalozos told us, essentially, what they need is a reduction in their operating costs and the modeling and implementation of the solutions they need.

Canonical’s Juju platform was introduced. Said platform is an ecosystem that provides the ability to easily set up infrastructures, including big data management systems. In Juju, you can implement applications (charms) in any language (Puppet, Ansible, Bash, Python, Java), use applications implemented by others through a rich collection, and collaborate with other providers through the community. Watch Dr. Konstantinos Tsakalozos’s presentation here: http://go.scify.gr/sfacIN13PrKT

Then, Dr. George Giannakopoulos talked about the application of big data in a multitude of cases, from social media and bioinformatics to the maintenance of wind turbines! He emphasized that big data is not just “a lot” of data, meaning its volume is not its only characteristic. Data characteristics indicative of a “big data” problem are also the speed of data change, the variety of forms and ways it occurs, the ability to verify the data, and the value generated from it (enabling action). He touched upon the Big Data Europe Program [1], an international project funded by the EU, which brings 16 organizations from 10 European countries together into a collaboration for the future of “big data” in Europe. The 7 project development pilots are aligned with the societal challenges of the Horizon 2020 funding framework [2] and, more specifically, are 1) Pharmacology, 2) Oenology, 3) Energy (wind turbines), 4) Assessment of traffic conditions, 5) Climate, 6) Social Sciences, and 7) Secure Societies.

You can find Dr. George Giannakopoulos’s presentation here: http://go.scify.gr/sfacIN13PrGG

Sources:

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

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

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