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Rebecca Parsons, CTO of ThoughtWorks

Rebecca Parsons

Biography: Rebecca Parsons

Dr. Parsons has more than 20 years of application development experience in industries ranging from telecommunications to emergent internet services. She has been published in language and artificial intelligence media, served on numerous program committees, and currently reviews academic articles for several journals.

Before coming to ThoughtWorks she worked as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida. She also worked as director's post doctoral fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory researching issues in parallel and distributed computation, genetic algorithms, computational biology and non-linear dynamical systems.

Dr. Parsons holds a [Ph.D] in Computer Science from Rice University.

Presentation: The Data Panorama

Track: Keynote / Time: Wednesday 09:00 - 10:00 / Location: To be announced

The term "data processing" is an anachronism in our profession, yet dominates what many of us do in our day-to-day lives. Today the world of data is changing and becoming yet more important as data became a significant competitive advantage in the online world. We are collecting increasing amounts of data, but wanting to process it in decreasing time. This data doesn't just have to be processed simply, but picked over with more sophisticated techniques to look for patterns and connections that reveal knowledge. This demands new techniques in data storage, cracking the two-decade domination of relational databases. It also raises questions about how us software professionals influence the way data is used, both in offering business opportunities and using data for social progress.