The fourth Big Data Berlin took place on Thursday at Instituto Cervantes with insightful talks by four industry professionals and plenty of time to network before and after over beer and pizza kindly provided by Criteo.

The talks kicked off at about 7:20 in a packed exhibition room at the Instituto Cervantes, which has certainly added a value to the evening with the Spanish art exhibition currently on display and the lovely atmosphere created by the space.

I started by giving a small background on who we are as Dataconomy, and how we are trying to build this data lovers community online and offline. It seems like a natural step forward to us to take that community that follows our news stories and reads tech-oriented content on the website either to inform or to educate themselves, all together in real time, real space in order to get to know each other, connect and hear and learn from industry professionals with long time experience in the field.

Our first speaker for the evening was Brian Bulkowski, CTO at Aerospike, a company that operates real time Web and mobile applications with the aim to create a more interactive and global front edge database. Brian discussed new models that could optimize advertising results, get more data and better models through NoSQL.

Carsten Petzold took the floor to demonstrate how big data can optimize online dating experience. He shared some fun facts about the dating industry such as that there are about 300 million searches per month around buzz words such as love, dating, flirting etc., that 33% of married people have met online (and I am certain that number will double very soon), 50% of singles use online dating and in a nutshell, it is a huge industry. Carsten talked about optimizing users experience to get better and more integrated results and how data can optimize search engines. Carsten’s talk certainly gave some good ideas putting all that good data into use and turned a business talk into a good flirting opportunity.

Franz Scwab from Exasol AG followed with a much more technical talk providing solutions to chasing that pareto frontier, or else, how to achieve in-database multi criteria optimization with Skyline Querries. Every company thinks of its customer and tries to find optimal solutions for both the customer and the company. Skyline queries can compute the Pareto Frontier which gives back non-dominated solutions and consequently reduce data volumes by filtering only relevant content and accelerate the decision making process.

Our last speaker for the evening was Charles Radclyffe who asked a rather philosophical question that I am also pondered by for quite a while now – are analytics, ioT and Artificial Intelligence a convergence, a threat or an opportunity? Well, one should certainly use the right tools to solve whatever business or non-business related issues arise but the question persists as to how the future will evolve and the humane or inhumane result that will bring.

After the talk finished, we all had the time to get to know each other and network, approach the speakers, ask questions and find career opportunities over free pizza. Overall, it was a great evening and we are very pleased with your attendance and encouragement – looking forward to our next Berlin event at Instituto Cervantes on April 30th!