• On Tuesday, we had the honor of hosting the follow-up forum for Data Insight SF.

    The forum was the finale to a three-day long dataviz hackathon competition held at Adobe and hosted by  swissnex San Francisco, The Kingdom of the Netherlands and Creative Commons.

    We were impressed with the visual representations presented by the teams. The results were both interesting and stimulating, and it was an opportunity to see the convergence of technology and art through a different perspective.

    We love the thought of bringing together creative minds to create an awesome weekend project and Data Insight provided the perfect opportunity for groups to execute some great ideas with open source data.

    We'd like to congratulate the winners, and all those who participated!

    It’s amazing what can be accomplished in a single weekend and we’re inspired by the efforts of all teams.

    We also thoroughly enjoyed the expert panel speaking on Tuesday, featuring:

    Peter Aldous (Moderator), San Francisco bureau chief, New Scientist Magazine. Peter is reporting on biology, medicine, social sciences and the environment. He’s especially interested in data journalism, and has made visualizations on topics from ranging from earthquakes and their casualties to networks of citation among stem cell researchers. Peter also teaches in the Science Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

    Sean Gourley, co-founder and CTO, Quid. Sean did research into the mathematics of war for his PhD thesis at Balliol College, Oxford. His findings appeared as the featured article in “Nature” (December 2009) and were the subject of a popular TED talk (2009). His work on statistical analysis, probability, and algorithm development applied to complex systems and large datasets inspired the creation of Quid. Sean is a Rhodes Scholar PhD in Physics (Complexity) from the University of Oxford; his is undergraduate degree in Physics is from the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.

    Tyler Bell is the Director of Product for Factual, a LA-based startup that is, amongst other things, creating a global coverage of the world’s POI and businesses.  He previously taught archaeology at the University of Oxford and, more recently and topically, was the Product Lead for Yahoo’s Geo Technologies Group. He writes about semantic- and geo-technologies for O’Reilly Radar at http://radar.oreilly.com/tylerb/

    Sep Kamvar, Consulting assistant professor of Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University. His research focuses on social computing and information management, and he is particularly interested in personal and social models for search. From 2003 to 2007, Sep was the head of personalization at Google. Sep is the author of two books and over 40 technical publicationsand patents in the fields of search and social computing. He is on the technical advisory boards of several companies, including Aardvark and Etsy. His artwork has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Musem in London, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens.

    Joris Maltha, Founder, Catalogtree, a multidisciplinary design studio. The studio works continuously on commissioned and self initiated design projects. The studio’s guiding design tactic is FORM = BEHAVIOUR. Typography, generative graphic design and the visualisation of quantitative data are daily routines. Other recent endeavours include: D.I.Y. structured-light 3D-scanning, Bristle bot development and the visualisation of financial tick-data.

     

     

    There was a great turnout in the audience, and everyone had some interesting ideas into the significance of data visualization, trends, and future developments. We’re pleased that we could host this incredible group of speakers, and we could tell from the questions that the audience was enjoying the event too!

    Read More about the hackathon in this great blog post from InfoChimps.

    Watch the presentations on YouTube:
    http://www.youtube.com/user/swissnexSanFrancisco

    And check out some of the Tweets:

     

    Congrats again to all who participated - great event!

  • Jen Charlton

    About Jen Charlton