Computation meets Data Science in London, Thursday 5 March

I'm usually going on about "computation" or in education, "maths". But I've come to appreciate just how much of computation's utility in modern life centres around data (rather than, say, algebraic modelling).

Clearly data science is a major, growing and vital field—one that's relatively new in its current incarnation. It's been born and is driven forward by new technology, our abilities to collect, store, transmit and "process" ever larger quantities of data.

But "processing" has often failed to elucidate what's important in the data. We need answers, not just analytics, we need decisions not just big data.

Computation in all its forms is a key to getting decisions from data. And funnily enough, it's not only for analytics that computation's used but for enabling human language data interrogation, interactive deployment and many other examples—crucial usability, not only raw computational power.

It's to bring all these aspects together that we're hosting a one-day summit in London this Thursday entitled "Mastering your data with the [latest, most powerful!] computation", that's with my [ ] editorial.

Most people don't recognise Wolfram as a key data science company. And yet over the last few years, we've built up and a unique and integrated technology stack not only to offer the most powerful computation on data but to optimise usability across the whole workflow and crucially to be a data science platform.

Now we have hosted the "Wolfram Data Summit" in the US for the last 5 years. The emphasis is a little different from our upcoming London summit though related: "A high-level gathering of innovators in data science, creators of connected devices, and leaders of major data repositories". In London, we'll be focussed on how new ideas can be deployed today in your organisation.

In the end, London will be a great follow-on, fill-out and extension to many fields beyond democracy from my TEDx at the UK Parliament kick-off talk earlier this year in which I addressed the question "has more data led to better decisions and better democracy".

Really hope we'll see you there.