Strata Data Conference

Strata Data Conference
Name	Strata Data Conference
Status	Defunct (last held 2019)
Genre	Technology conference
Frequency	Annual
Location	San Jose, New York City, London, Barcelona
Years active	2012–2019
Organizer	O'Reilly Media
Attendees	Data scientists, engineers, analysts

Strata Data Conference Strata Data Conference was an annual series of events focused on data science, big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence organized by O'Reilly Media. The conference brought together practitioners from companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon (company), and IBM alongside researchers from institutions like Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton University. Strata fostered interactions between vendors including Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR Technologies, Snowflake (company), and Databricks as well as open source projects such as Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, TensorFlow, Kubernetes, and PyTorch.

Overview

Strata Data Conference served as a nexus connecting practitioners from Netflix, Uber Technologies, Airbnb', LinkedIn, Twitter, Spotify, Salesforce, Oracle Corporation, and Cisco Systems with academic researchers from Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, University of Washington, and University of Oxford. Sessions spanned implementations featuring Hadoop Distributed File System, Apache Kafka, Presto (SQL query engine), Apache Flink, Apache Cassandra, and Elasticsearch while showcasing commercial platforms such as Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Cloudera Data Platform, and Snowflake (company). The conference emphasized practical workflows used at companies like Pinterest, eBay, Adobe Inc., PayPal, Capital One, and Goldman Sachs.

History and Evolution

Launched by O'Reilly Media in the early 2010s, Strata evolved alongside projects including Apache Hadoop, MapReduce, Apache Hive, and innovations from labs at IBM Research, Bell Labs, Google Research, Microsoft Research, and Facebook AI Research. Early gatherings featured speakers from Yahoo!, eBay, AOL, New York Times Company, The Guardian, and Financial Times addressing data journalism using tools like D3.js and R (programming language). Over time, the conference incorporated developments from DeepMind, OpenAI, Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR), and institutes such as Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and SRI International. Strategic shifts mirrored industry consolidations involving Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR Technologies, Teradata, SAP SE, and Splunk.

Conference Format and Topics

Programming formats included tutorials, training, hands-on sessions, and keynote addresses by leaders from Google Brain, Facebook AI Research, Uber AI Labs, Amazon AI, and Microsoft Research. Technical tracks covered subjects tied to Python (programming language), Scala (programming language), Julia (programming language), SQL, NoSQL, Graph databases, and platforms used by Stripe, Square (company), Robinhood Markets, Bloomberg L.P., and Thomson Reuters. Workshops explored model deployment with Docker, Kubernetes, TensorFlow Serving, MLflow, and Kubeflow and operational concerns such as observability from Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, and Prometheus (monitoring system). Ethics and policy sessions involved contributors from Electronic Frontier Foundation, ACLU, World Economic Forum, European Commission, and United Nations panels.

Notable Speakers and Keynotes

Keynotes and invited talks drew leaders and researchers including representatives or affiliates of Jeff Dean (through Google Research), Yann LeCun (New York University / Facebook AI Research), Andrew Ng (Stanford University / Coursera), Hilary Mason (Fast Forward Labs), DJ Patil (United States Chief Data Scientist), Cathy O'Neil (New York University), Claudia Perlich (Dstillery), Jeffrey Heer (University of Washington), and Matei Zaharia (Stanford University / Databricks). Panels featured executives from Intel Corporation, NVIDIA, ARM Holdings, Broadcom Inc., Samsung Electronics, Qualcomm, and Hitachi. Speakers often came from academic groups such as MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Oxford Machine Learning Research Group, Cambridge University Department of Computer Science and Technology, ETH Zurich, and Imperial College London.

Industry Impact and Community

The conference influenced practices at enterprises including Walmart, Target Corporation, Home Depot, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Merck & Co., Novartis, Bayer AG, and GlaxoSmithKline by disseminating case studies on supply chain analytics, clinical trials, and marketing attribution. Startups showcased at the event included DataRobot, H2O.ai, Alteryx, Palantir Technologies, Trifacta, Looker, and Tableau Software, with investor presence from Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Accel Partners, and Kleiner Perkins. Community aspects tied together meetup chapters such as Women in Data Science, PyData, R-Ladies, Machine Learning Tokyo, and DataKind and collaborations with conferences like KDD (conference), NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, SIGMOD, VLDB, and ACM SIGKDD.

Regional and Partner Events

Regional editions and partner events occurred in locales such as San Francisco, New York City, London, Barcelona, Singapore, Sydney, Berlin, Tel Aviv, Bangalore, Toronto, Vancouver, Chicago, and Seattle. Partnerships and co-located forums involved organizations such as The New York Times Company, Financial Times, The Economist, Bloomberg L.P., MIT Technology Review, TechCrunch, and Wired (magazine). Academic partnerships included collaborations with UC Berkeley School of Information, Columbia Data Science Institute, Harvard Data Science Initiative, Stanford Data Science Initiative, and Oxford Internet Institute.

Category:Technology conferences