In 2013, commodity hardware and computing capacity for storing and processing large
and small volumes of data are easily available on demand. The bigger issues pertain
to questions of how to scale data processing, handle data diversity, manage infrastructure costs,
decide which technologies work best for different contexts and problems, and build products from
the insights and intelligence that the data is presenting to you.
The Fifth Elephant 2013 is a three-day workshop and conference on big data,
storage and analytics, with product demos and hacker corners.
Of the Community,
By the Community,
For the Community
One of the unique features of The Fifth Elephant (and HasGeek events in general) is the community’s defining role. The speakers, the curators and the attendees are all from the same community.
Anyone is welcome to propose a session. Participants who have purchased conference tickets will vote on session proposals. The Programme Committee steering The Fifth Elephant 2013 will also vote on submissions and balance the community voting. The Programme Committee consists of data analysts and big data practitioners.
Proposal submissions are reviewed on the basis of use cases, how a problem was solved, or why a particular technology and/or approach was adopted for solving the problem. Proposers can refer to open source technologies and tools available for storage, analytics and visualisation in their submissions.
This year’s programme committee boasts of experience and expertise from different spectrums of Big Data — practitioners working on storage and cloud computing as well as architects and technologists working on analytics and business intelligence.
Gopal Vijayraghavan
Hortonworks
Gopal has spent many years making PHP faster at Yahoo! and Zynga. He thinks about performance problems as opportunities to contribute. He has turned towards Hadoop for newer challenges and is chasing performance at both ends of the scale spectrum at Hortonworks.
Beyond work, he’s a photographer by day, biker by sunset, and by night he posts random thoughts.
Govind Kanshi
Microsoft
Govind works at Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Bangalore helping customers adopt technology platform, ranging from applied software solutions and processes. He can be usually found ‘learning’ more about ‘how things work’ and demystifying them in pragmatic way. His expertise lies in developing applications and finding/fixing bottlenecks. Data excites him, and terms like startburst and byzantine evoke his curiosity.
Outside work, food, books and movies, travel keeps him busy. He blogs occasionally.
Joydeep Sen Sharma
Qubole
Joydeep is a co-founder at Qubole and heads their India development team. Prior to starting Qubole, he worked at Facebook where he boot-strapped the data processing ecosystem based on Hadoop, started the Apache Hive project and led the Data Infrastructure team. Joydeep studied Computer Science at IIT-Delhi and University of Pittsburgh. He has previously worked at Oracle, Netapp and Yahoo!
Joydeep holds numerous patents, has many published papers and has been both speaker and panelist at Hadoop summits and at other Silicon Valley conferences.
Srinivasan Seshadri (Sesh)
Boltell
Sesh has significant expertise in internet technologies and is a well-known database and information retrieval researcher. He spent the initial part of his career in academia and research, first at IIT Bombay and then at Bell Labs, Murray Hill. Subsequently, Sesh returned to India as the founding CEO of Strand Genomics (now Strand Life Sciences). He was also the founding CTO of Yahoo! India.
Sesh currently runs Boltell Infomedia, a tech-savvy company with a focus on emerging technologies and building out next-generation software.
Tickets
Workshop
July 11
Two parallel tracks of hands-on workshop sessions
Breakfast & Lunch
Rs 1,500
Available until July 10th
Conference
July 12 & 13
Two days of talks & discussions
Expo area & hacker corners
Breakfast & Lunch
Event party
Rs 4000
Rs 2,600
Save Rs 1,400 until July 4th
Corporate
July 11, 12 & 13
Workshop + Conference
Event T-Shirt
Ticket sponsorship credit
Custom invoice
Rs 6,000
Available until July 9th
Buy Tickets
Single day conference tickets for 12th & 13th will be available at the venue.
2012 Edition
2 days
3 tracks
50 sessions
600+ participants
Last year’s edition of The Fifth Elephant was the first conference in India which focused on big data and analytics.
The event brought together developers, researchers, scientists, analysts, CTOs, CEOs and academicians who took part in various discussions on big data infrastructure, analytics and application of technology for harnessing untapped potential of data.
Participants were exposed to some of the popular and emerging technology stacks for storing and processing big data. They learnt about programming languages and libraries available for producing compelling visualisations. In the analytics track, statisticians and analysts spoke about various tools and techniques for building business intelligence and telling stories with data. Overall, the first edition presented the multiple meanings and facets of big data to participants and helped them in understanding the emerging ecosystem.
The Fifth Elephant 2012 also brought together community and advocacy organisations such as The Centre for Internet and Society, The Internet Archive, Open Knowledge Foundation Network and Wikipedia India chapter to showcase the value of open data and community supported efforts in collecting and publishing public data. The presence of these organisations facilitated in answering participants’ questions about how to use big data for the benefit of society.
