‘Take on the mission to the dataverse’ was written on banners all over Olympia during the Big Data LDN conference held in London last week.
– Andreea Marina
Big Data LDN is one of the UKs biggest data and analytics event. What an incredible event filled with brilliant minds, unique market developments and great networking opportunities. With over 180 exhibitors I had the opportunity to experience live demos of some truly revolutionary platforms – most of which, were intensively leveraging AI.
Now this was truly fascinating but not surprising: everyone was talking about Large Language Processing and Generative AI.
Generative AI was unveiled as the top data trend at Big Data 2023. Mike Ferguson, Conference Chair, summarised the top key trends in Data Management & Analytics, headlining his list were Gen AI spearheading innovation, the commoditisation of Hybrid Cloud and architecture modernisation.
In an industry that is constantly changing, it is increasingly important to stay informed about AI trends and market challenges.
The conference hosted over 300 speakers on fifteen different stages! Out of all the talks that I have attended, one that stuck with me was ‘A history of Large Language Models’. Terry McCann, the CEO of Advancing Analytics delivered an incredible talk on the history large language models from Bag-of-words model to Recurrent Neural Networks and today’s Transformers. It was fascinating to see how far we have come as a society in the development of large language models and better understand the strengths and weaknesses of these models.
Lastly, as a female in the technology industry, it was incredible to see such a big presence at the Women in Data booth. Women in Data is an organisation that aims to empower and support women through their careers in data. The event felt truly inclusive, and it was just amazing to see an increase in the number of women involved in the industry, celebrating and elevating each other.
I am already waiting for the registrations to open for Big Data LDN 2024 as I would not want to miss that!
