Ben Lorica is a data scientist, a person who analyzes data to gain insights. Once known as quants, data analysts, actuaries, or any other number of unsexy terms, the appellation data scientist came into vogue with the emergence and rise of Big Data in the worlds of technology and business, and in the popular imagination. Author Tom Davenport and then White House data science chief D.J. Patil published a 2012 Harvard Business Review article describing the data scientist as the “sexiest job of the 21st Century”. Cool. Lorica, after completing his Ph.D. in Mathematics, went on to a career analyzing data for investment firms and banks like Wells Fargo. Today, Lorica is Chief Data Scientist and Program Director of the Strata Data Conference, for O’Reilly Media, a technology and business media and education firm that organizes industry events that have historically served the tech community.  Next week in New York, Lorica, as conference co-chair, will kick off the fall 2017 program for the Strata Data Conference, which will run from Monday, September 25 through Thursday, September 28. Held at the massive Javits Center, event organizers anticipate the New York program to draw in excess of 6,000 registrants this year. What began in Santa Clara, CA in 2011 as a “gathering of data scientists” according to Lorica, has grown from 1,400 initial registrants and 125 speakers to its present size, with over 340 speakers. Its participants have traditionally comprised data scientists, data engineers and programmers in the Big Data technology known as Hadoop, along with a smattering of tech-savvy business people. More than five years since the launch of Strata, interest in data, Big Data, and data science, and the demand for more knowledge and experience in the realm of data continues to grow. What is probably the largest data conference in the world today is the result of the 2012 merger of the O’Reilly Strata Conference and Hadoop World, an annual program first organized by the Big Data firm Cloudera in New York in 2009, to create what was then known as Strata + Hadoop World. #Cloudera, a pioneer in #BigData software, first started shipping #Hadoop, the primary technology underlying Big Data, in 2008. O’Reilly Media, founded in 1984, has positioned itself at the forefront of successive waves of technology evolution and innovation -- Internet, Open Source, Big Data, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Inc. Magazine once called O’Reilly Founder and CEO Tim O’Reilly “the Oracle of Silicon Valley”, and the firm notes on its website that it has “educated a generation of technologists and entrepreneurs”. Today, O’Reilly organizes 19 conferences around the world, including the Strata Artificial Intelligence Conference with programs in New York and San Francisco.
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