by Charles Roe
DATAVERSITY™ recently interviewed Massimo Ruffolo, the CTO at Altilia. Massimo will be giving a session at the Enterprise Data World 2014 Conference in Austin, Texas from April 27 – May 1, 2014. His session is titled “How to Turn Big Data into Smart Data and Make Sense Of It All.”
The Speaker Spotlight Column (and its parallel venture the Sponsor Spotlight Column) is an ongoing project that focuses on highlighting several of the central issues represented at the many Data Management conferences produced by DATAVERSITY.
The primary emphasis of the interview was to question Massimo Ruffolo on his work and history within the industry, with particular importance on his presentation at the upcoming conference:
DATAVERSITY (DV): What are you going to discuss during your session at EDW14, and what will the audience gain from attending your talk? (Please be specific about one or two issues you’ll be addressing and the benefits the audience will obtain).
Massimo Ruffolo (MR): In the talk I will show how to face issues arising from data volume, variety and information sources heterogeneity. In particular, I will present the MANTRA Smart Data Management Platform that enables to turn Big Data into Smart Data, that is data enriched by their explicit and implicit semantics, so users can make sense of all accessible and available data in order to get faster and smarter insights for a new generation decision support.
The audience will learn how to:
- Automatically acquire relevant information from heterogeneous web sources and documents.
- Integrate web data with data available into enterprise sources.
- Manage structured and unstructured data in a uniform way.
- Combine NoSQL/NewSQL tools, semantic approaches, unstructured data management and NLP techniques, Big Data analytics and Cloud computing infrastructures for enabling Contextual Processing Workflows (i.e. a workflow-based approach, inspired to the Apps paradigm) that allows collecting, integrating, managing and analyzing Big Data.
DV: What is really important about such a topic in terms of the current state of Data Management and / or how the industry going to transform moving into the future?
MR: One of the most important aspects in the current state of Data Management technologies is that just combining and managing Big Data is not enough. Businesses and institutions need to make sense of Big Data.
In the future Data Management technologies should allow sense making of Big Data that may be achieved by enabling the ability to deal with data variety and information sources heterogeneity. Future data management platforms will become smarter than today because they will be able to:
- Automatically gather contents form web information sources (e.g. e-commerce web sites, social and on-line media).
- Exploit valuable information locked into unstructured data by using the power of semantic approaches and NLP.
- Integrate and enrich structured data available in enterprise data sources with structured and unstructured data spread in enterprise and web information sources.
- Analyze data by descriptive and predictive machine learning algorithms that freely learns relevant patterns with no need for a schema (e.g cognitive computing approaches)
DV: Please tell us a little about yourself and your history in the industry, past work experience, and how you got started in the data profession?
MR: I’m a serial entrepreneur, with 15 years of experience, as co-founder of academic spin-off companies and start-ups operating in the fields of semantic technologies and Big Data.
I’m also a researcher in computer science. The wide range of my research and development interests (semantic technologies, information extraction, web wrapping, knowledge representation and reasoning, natural language processing, document layout analysis and understanding, web query languages, business intelligence, analytics, text and data mining, ontologies, knowledge management, Big Data processing and management) in conjunction with my entrepreneurial experience convinced me, over the time, that for improving data and information management for decision support scopes technologies must enable joint exploitation of both structured and unstructured web and enterprise data.
DV: What is the biggest challenge happening in your particular area of Data Management at this time?
MR: In my opinion, from a research point of view, most interesting challenges are:
- How to manage data semantics in a schema-less and automatic fashion?
- How to automatically, efficiently and high precisely extract data from the web data sources and documents?
- How to involve data semantics into machine learning in order to discover semantic patterns capable to facilitate sense making of Big Data? Is the cognitive computing movement the right approach for doing that?
From a technological point of view most important challenges are:
- Really and effectively facilitate integration between structured and unstructured data.
- Create Big Data visualization tools that enable uniform navigation of both structured and unstructured data.
- Create integrated technological platforms that facilitate big data integration and management, and make viable information management and business intelligence processes capable to give better and faster insight to business users in driving managerial, operational and marketing processes.
- Enabling artificial intelligence approach capable to help business users to make sense of Big Data in novel and smarter ways.
DV: How is such a change influencing your job?
MR: Current changes are driving my research activities and affecting decisions related the implementation of the Altilia MANTRA Platform. In particular, by my research and development working activities I’m trying to address above-mentioned challenges.
DV: How have your job, and / or the work you are doing at your organization, altered in the past 12 months? How do you expect it will change in the next 1-2 years?
MR: My work is continuously changing in terms of new challenges to address; this is due to the fact that new aspects arise from real problems faced by working with customers. Customers needs pose interesting research and development challenges which solutions to consider new and different aspects maintaining the focus on the big picture which MANTRA Smart Data Management Platform is founded on.
DV: Are there any other emerging technologies you predict will affect your job function in the future?
MR: I think that in next months I will explore cognitive computing capabilities. In particular, in Altilia we are searching for a next generation analytical algorithms capable to support sense making processes we have in mind to support by the MANTRA Platform.
DV: What’s your favorite “Data” or “Data Management” quote?
MR: “It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best.” – W. Edwards Deming
DV: How do you explain what you do for work, at a cocktail party, or to your grandparents?
MR: I spend my working days thinking and creating methods that allow companies to gather, manage and exploit huge amount of data for better and smarter working and making more money.
If you are interested in attending Massimo’s session at EDW2014, please see the conference schedule at: http://edw2014.dataversity.net/agenda.cfm?confid=79&scheduleDay=PRINT
His session is on Tuesday, April 29th at 3.00pm.
About Enterprise Data World:
Enterprise Data World is the business world’s most comprehensive educational event about data and information management. Over five days, EDW presents a diverse schedule of programming that addresses every level of proficiency, including keynotes, workshops, tutorials, case studies, and discussions.
The post Speaker Spotlight Column: Massimo Ruffolo on Big Data appeared first on DATAVERSITY.