Data-driven disruption: the view from silicon valley

We live in an era where software is transforming industries, the sciences, and society as a whole. This exciting phenomenon has been described by the phrase "software is eating the world." It is becoming increasingly apparent that data is the fuel powering software's conquests. Data is the new disruptor. It's hard to believe that the first decade of the Big Data era is already behind us. Silicon Valley has been at the forefront of developing and applying data-driven approaches to create disruption at many levels: infrastructure (e.g., Hadoop and Spark), capabilities (e.g., image recognition and machine translation), and killer apps (e.g., self-driving cars and messaging bots). In this talk, we first look back on the past decade and share learnings from the frontlines of data-driven disruption. Looking ahead, we then describe challenges and opportunities for the next decade. Since this has also been a personal journey, we will use examples drawn from personal experience to illustrate each point.