Recipe for understanding big data

serves

20 people

prep time

14 hours

level

some experience can help

Ingredients

For the context sauce:

• 3 million bots on Twitter
• 1L of personal information bubble, crushed
• several fortunes made and unmade over lines of code
• 1 tsp of “software will eat the world”
• 200 gr of black box
opacity, as opaque as possible
• 1 very large piece of influence
• 3 million Km of optic fibre
• 1 very very large cloud

For the cake of understanding:

• 11 thousand recipes
• 2220 ingredients
• 1 database
• 1 API or programming interface
• 2 sleeves, rolled up
• a pinch of salt
• a crack of pepper

Preparation

Mix all ingredients for the context sauce in a large bowl and let them sit for a while. You will know they are ready when you start seeing ads following you everywhere you go.

On a separate tray, prepare your personal data and let it simmer on an online pressure cooker for about a year, until multiple digital personalities ferment and have a life of their own.

Algorithmic Kitchen is a workshop where you will learn how algorithms munch on big data and how these algorithms are made. During this workshop you will make your own and we will let it crunch its logic on a large database of fine cuisine. Together we will cook the tastiest outcomes, so that you can have your cake and eat it too. Serve warm and in good company. Goes well with bubbles or nutty liqueurs.

The Pantry

The Pantry is a customized version of Anaconda Python that we use during the workshop. It is a web-based programming environment that is quickly becoming the standard in Data Science.

Attendants will be able to get their hands dirty starting from a set of pre-loaded examples, so that they can start messing with their algorithmic recipe book right away. No prior knowledge of programming is required, but if you have any experience it wont hurt.

Using the pantry you can learn how to use algorithms used in many modern applications such as sentiment analysis, natural language processing, recommender systems, etc.