WHY EXPLORING BIG DATA IS HARD AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Canada
seen from China
seen from China
seen from Canada
seen from Taiwan

seen from Canada

seen from United States
seen from Yemen
seen from United States

seen from Canada
seen from China

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Yemen

seen from Pakistan
seen from Yemen

seen from Malaysia

seen from Malaysia
WHY EXPLORING BIG DATA IS HARD AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Photo via (x).
Here at Union Metrics we like to give our employees the chance to enrich themselves and their careers by attending a conference of their choice each year. Here’s Senior Front-End Engineer Ben Kimball’s experience at OpenVis, in his own words.
Our Senior Front-End Engineer Goes to OpenVis.
Here at Union Metrics, we regularly need to make sense of large amounts of data, from millions of tweets to a stream of Instagram photos. While at the OpenVis Conference in Boston last week, Senior Front-End Engineer Ben Kimball caught one particularly eye-catching presentation by Ian Webster, who demonstrated a system for visualizing large data sets— and they don't come much larger than space! Asterank is a scientific and economic database of over 600,000 asteroids. It focuses on estimating the costs and rewards of mining asteroids. For example, you can use it to find the most valuable asteroid we know of (511 Davida, a chunk of nickel, cobalt, and iron 200 miles across worth roughly 27 million trillion US dollars) or the most cost-effective asteroid to mine (1999 JU3, $34.5 billion in profit which will be just 0.4 AU from Earth on July 24th of next year). You can also explore a visualization of discovered exoplanets, superimposed on our solar system. Most of them are closer to their sun than Earth is to ours. And then there's the Millenium Run, "the largest n-body supercomputer simulation ever," which traces the evolution of over 10 billion pieces of dark matter. You can fly through it.
The takeaway? Even if you’re not working with giant flying space rocks, you can distill large amounts of data into something of value for your audience by concisely teaching them something they didn’t know before, and/or giving them a way to interact with the data to learn something new on their own.
Curious about our other employees' conference experiences? See what our Social Media Manager learned at the Social Shake-Up 2014, our Customer Success Manager at Pulse 2015, or our Marketing Manager at Dreamforce 2015.
The projects we picked to open today’s Interactive Inspiration aren’t actually new, but they were mentioned a couple of days ago on Twitter, during the 2015 OpenVis Conference, as examples of great use of d3.js.
Planning Stages
Since there are so few authorities on this topic, I'm hoping my explorations can begin with sets of ongoing conversations with people from various fields. It only seems natural to try to better understand uncertainty not by referencing or becoming an authority on the matter, but by organically mapping out the questions we all have and hypothesis to test.
There's currently an open call for speakers at Bocoup's OpenVis conference, set in Boston this April. A shared spreadsheet of topics the organizers would like to see covered has been going around, and it seems like one of the most agree-upon wants is for someone to talk about visualizing uncertainty. A number of others listed have to do with the role of art and aesthetics in data design.
Thinking of applying fills me with equal parts dread/anxiety/imposter syndrome and excitement... Given the roster of past speakers, I doubt I'd make it in this year anyways, but somehow it feels appropriate to at least try to come up with a proposal. All very much in the spirit of tackling the unknown!