Last Thursday, 6^th September 2018, EY Malta hosted an event they named, All Things Tech – Harness the Power of your data. With a very data-oriented line-up of speakers, the event was intended for data specialists working in companies which were not making the best use of the data available to them. The event was introduced by Michael Azzopardi, who is the IT Advisory Senior Manager at EY Malta (Azzopardi & Gaskin, 2018) who encouraged the audience to listen and participate by asking questions. Mr. Azzopardi thanked the sponsors; ABBYY, IBM and the University of Malta for making this event possible.

Following Mr. Azzopardi’s brief introductory speech, we are then introduced to Daniel Gaskin, EY’s senior consultant and moderator for the event. Mr. Gaskin informed the audience that the speakers they would be expecting were Greg Nakos, EY’s Executive Director, Daniela Castillo, a lecturer from the University of Malta, Jaume Castanyer Segura from IBM and Yevhen Zhurer from ABBYY. A discussion panel and open discussion is to be expected after the talks, where all speakers and Joseph Galea will participate. Questions from the audience are welcomed.

Greg Nakos is an associate partner from EY, leading the Data Management and Big Data team. (Nakos, Greg) Mr. Nakos connected via video conferencing from Greece to give his talk about reaping the value that big data brings. In his interesting talk, Mr. Nakos delved into possible use cases in which big data can be used, what big data is, how it can be used and discussed how GDPR affects the potential of big data. There is a lot of potential in data but GDPR restricts this and begs us to question whether we even have the necessary consent to make use of certain data.

First things first, what is big data? Mr. Nakos describes big data by data which is in great volumes, a variety of data, is identified by the velocity of data and the most important part of big data is the value of data. If the data has no value, it is meaningless and cannot be used efficiently as required. To reap the best potential of big data, the user must know what to do with it. Big data was defined as a complex landscape given the criteria which are required to make big data differ from other data.

As part of Mr. Nakos’ talk, a video was played about the amount of data which is collected for Google even when using mobile phones which are on airplane mode or without any data connectivity. The mobile phones had no access to the Internet and it was assumed that no data would be collected. This was further from the truth. Data was collected even when it was on airplane mode. Every single action the user took and even every place the user visited was being tracked. Google uses a business model known as Surveillance capitalism; collecting as much data as possible from the user to use this data to sell products to the user.

Following Mr. Nakos’ talk, the audience was asked to answer some questions in relation to the usage of big data at their companies. It was clear that the audience did not feel that their companies make the best use of data in their companies and felt that this could improve. The host welcomed Ms. Daniela Castillo to the stage. Ms. Daniela Castillo is an Assistant lecturer from the University of Malta as part of the Faculty of Economics, Management, and Accountancy. Her focus is making use of big data for the purposes of Marketing. (Daniela Castillo)

Ms. Castillo emphasizes the importance of data by highlighting that the volume of data is increasing at an exponential rate; 90% of all the data in the world has been created in the past two years alone. Every day 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created. The audience’s reaction agreed seemed to agree that that is a large amount of data. Since the amount of data might appear to be overwhelming, Ms. Castillo identifies that many marketers understand the potential of big data but steer clear of using it due to not knowing how to make use of it.

Jaume Castanyer Segura from IBM entered the IT industry in 1991. With his extensive experience in the I.T. field and backed with experience with a company like IBM, Mr. Castanyer Segura gave a very interesting talk on behalf of IBM in relation to IBM Watson Analytics. IBM Analytics is a suite of products which claim to be the first in providing a collection of tools and features for data, analytics and cognitive capabilities. Mr. Castanyer Segura informed the audience that in order to use the IBM Watson studio is to make use of machine learning to train the system. (IBM Analytics)

There are several different roles for a company to make the best use of data analytics and reap the potential of big data.  Mr. Castanyer Segura mentions that it is ideal to have someone to train the system, a data scientist (who the speaker refers to as god) to build the models and understands the way they work, another person would be knowledgeable in understanding how to structure, and a developer. Together, these people need to work together to make the best use of the data at hand and to know which data they need to collect. Given that these people are very valuable resources, it is essential that the people’s times are not wasted teaching them new tools to adapt to the company but rather make use of tools they know and bring these skills with them to the company. IBM Watson Analytics make it easier for companies to achieve this since they are compatible with different systems.

The final speaker of the event was Yevhen Zhurer from ABBYY in Ukraine. Mr. Zhurer (in collaboration with EY) is responsible for automating processes for companies and given his extensive experience, is also a consultant in the field. ABBYY is a company which specializes in OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and text scanning. (ABBYY) The focus of the talk was on transforming business documents into valuable data to be used in companies.

There are several stages at which transforming business documents into data such as, business process management and business mapping, building knowledge repository and natural language processing and cognitive automation with machine learning and artificial intelligence. The users do not program but rather teaches ABBYY how to operate from the documents feed to it in the training phase. This talk was especially interesting to anyone who is particularly interested in OCR, natural language processing and machine learning.

The interesting talks were followed by a discussion panel where the audience was invited to participate by submitting their questions. Their questions were answered by the four speakers; Greg Nakos, Daniela Castillo, Jaume Castanyer Segura, and Yevhen Zhurer, and Joseph Galea, who is the director at EY. Mr. Galea has extensive knowledge in Risk Management and Cybersecurity and was able to give interesting input to the discussion panel. (Joseph Galea)

This event was jampacked with several interesting topics from experts in the field who traveled from other countries in order to talk to the audience. The hosts of the event invited the audience to their next event, EY Malta Attractiveness Event 2018 to be held on 24^th October 2018. (EY Malta’s Annual Attractiveness Event)

References

ABBYY. (n.d.). Retrieved from ABBYY: https://www.abbyy.com/en-us/

Azzopardi, M., & Gaskin, D. (2018, August 29). Using data in a smart way. Retrieved from LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/using-data-smart-way-michael-azzopardi/

Daniela Castillo. (n.d.). Retrieved from University of Malta: https://www.um.edu.mt/profile/danielacastillo

EY Malta’s Annual Attractiveness Event. (n.d.). Retrieved from EY: https://www.ey.com/mt/en/home/ey-maltas-annual-attractiveness-event

IBM Analytics. (n.d.). Retrieved from IBM: https://www.ibm.com/analytics/in/en/

Joseph Galea. (n.d.). Retrieved from Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-galea-6265326/?originalSubdomain=mt#education-section

Nakos, Greg. (n.d.). Retrieved from Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregnakos/