Taking an intelligence augmentation journey and harnessing stream data
NEW YORK—At the AXA Center last June 13, the Data-Driven meetup featured speakers Christopher Nguyen, founder and CEO of Arimo (data intelligence platform); Adam Kanouse, CTO of Narrative Science (transforms data into meaningful and insightful narratives); Neha Narkhede, founder and CTO of Confluent (real-time data platform built around Apache Kafka) and Nitay Joffe, founder and CTO of Action IQ (next-generation data platform for marketing and consumer data).
Nguyen talked about his company Arimo, formerly Adatao, which started building its platform with pAnalytics and Apache Spark. It was designed to be a comfortable working environment for data scientists and engineers, who work in familiar tools such R, Python, SQL and Java.
Business and data science users can collaborate and drive high-quality decisions via Arimo’s predictive applications and tools to companies with fast insights to critical business questions on big data. It is reportedly easy to use and deploy as it runs on existing SQL databases, Hadoop and cloud data sources. Businesses generate value from big data in minutes, not weeks or months. An API is provided for data scientists and engineers to work with the data and build applications on top of the data that expose it to the business users in a more friendly way. This means they can make better use of it and build charts and graphs on the fly in real time to suit their needs.
To that end, the business layer called pInsights lets end users query the data using natural language queries. The system learns from the data what types of data users are likely to ask about, and even learns as users query to provide an as you type drop-down capability with likely queries as you would get in Google search as you enter a search term.
“We are on an intelligence augmentation journey,” Nguyen said.
Kanouse’s Narrative Science is focused on creating software starting with advanced language generation platform, Quill, which transforms data into narratives people can read, so people will spend less time crunching numbers. ‘Presenting analysis takes 3 to 4 hours of your time.”
Confluent, founded by the creators of Apache Kafka, enables organizations to harness business value from stream data. The Confluent Platform manages the barrage of stream data and makes it available throughout an organization.
It provides various industries, from retail, logistics and manufacturing, to financial services and online social networking, a scalable, unified, real-time data pipeline that enables applications ranging from large volume data integration to big data analysis with Hadoop to real-time stream processing.
Narkhede presented Confluent, emphasizing how Kafka Connect does the hard work
- Scale out
- Fault tolerance
- Central Management
- Schema propagation
What is stream processing? It Isn’t necessarily transient, approximate or “lossy”?
Its developers have reportedly contributed more than 76 percent of all the open source Apache Kafka code, and built some of the largest production deployments in the world.
The company recently introduced Confluent Control center which examines their data to understand message delivery, possible bottlenecks, and observe the end-to-end deliverability of messages in their native Kafka environment. Its Control Center UI allows operators to connect new data sources to the cluster and configure new data sources connectors.
Apache Kafka is widely adopted for use cases ranging from collecting user activity data, logs, application metrics, stock ticker data and device instrumentation.
Its key strength is its ability to make high volume data available as a real-time stream for consumption in systems with very different requirements — from batch systems like Hadoop, to real-time systems that require low-latency access, to stream processing engines that transform the data streams as they arrive.
Apache Kafka is key data infrastructure that can serve as a single central nervous system, transmitting messages to all the different systems and applications within an organization.
Funded by leading investors including Sequoia Capital and First Mark Capital,Joffe’s ActionIQ is a stealth startup building the next generation of the marketing technology stack focused on customer data and business users.
Action IQ has designed it to make it look like playing with legos.
“It can be more costly to hire new customers as it is to retain an existing one,” Joffe said, who said he hires as much Data PHDs as he does UX designers.
