For the rest of the week’s events, see the list below or visit USGIF’s site here.

• Tuesday, May 21 – NGA Tech Showcase East
  This year’s new format will include morning briefings followed by demos at analyst workstations throughout the building. Registration is required as space is limited given the new format.
  NCE – Springfield, VA
  0700 – 1500
  Free for Government / $150 all others / Registration required

• Tuesday, May 21 – GEOINTeraction Tuesday
  Join us for an evening of casual networking.
  Walker’s Grille, 6909 Metro Park Dr, Alexandria, VA 22310 (5 minutes from NCE)
  1630 -1830
  Guest speaker, Ellen McCarthy, COO, NGA
  Free and open to all / No registration required

• Wednesday, May 22 – Spatial Literacy Workshop and YPG Session
  Esri will host a workshop on the geographic approach and spatial literacy. You can also join USGIF’s Young Professionals Group on managing your online presence, followed by a networking reception.
  Reston Hyatt, Reston, VA
  1400 – 1900
  Free and open to all / Registration required

• Thursday, May 23 – USGIF Technology Day
  Features nearly 20 professional development, education, and training offerings this year as well as 50 exhibiting organizations and a networking reception. Trainings are first-come, first-serve and will fill up quickly.
  Reston Hyatt, Reston, VA
  0700 -1900
  Free for Government / $25 all others / Registration required

Click on the image to see the whole infographic

At Thetus we take our bagels seriously, and apparently so does the rest of Portland! Since the loss of Kettleman’s Bagel Company a debate has continued over the best replacement bagel shop within the city. We decided to take it upon ourselves to quiet everyone’s concerns and get to the bottom of this bagel dispute and why not use our own analysis software to determine the best bagel shop in the city!

The Thetus analysis team selected five categories as key indicators of bagel perfection, rating factors like sweet or salty on a scale of 1 to 5. The office was then polled and the results were tallied, the five key indicators of an ideal bagel chosen were chewy, sweet, dense, large, and shiny. Next we performed a company-wide blind taste test comparison of nine Portland bagel shops, ranking the bagels on a scale of 1 to 5 in each of the five categories of perfection as well as overall experience.

The results were analyzed using a suite of tools offered in Savanna, the model-based analysis software solution developed by Thetus Corporation. See our Bagelmania infographic with the final bagel data. Based on overall experience, Rescue Bagels was rated number one. But when the overall experience score was compared to the score each bagel received in the five categories, the bagel that scored the closest to what Thetus associates with a “perfect” bagel was Marsee Baking. Disagree with our findings? Which bagel shop do you prefer?

Before, there wasn’t a platform to hold massive amounts of data but now as the article Big Data is big but a young market notes there is an option and it’s a cost effective one as well, “perhaps the biggest-name platform for handling this data is Hadoop, an open source distributed computing architecture that excels in handling massive data sets … the type of data analytics that used to only be available to the biggest companies in the world can now be done by small companies. The rise of cloud-delivered services … plus the continued drop in the price to store information, combined with a management platform like Hadoop to manage it, means more businesses are holding on to more data …it gives an opportunity for the little guys to catch up to the big guys.”

Companies can and should be taking advantage of  ”these two trends — a massive increase in the amount of data available to businesses, and a platform for handling it.” If done correctly companies and organizations “can save the data in case they find a use case for it down the line. Having all that data, plus a platform to analyze it, means companies can run queries based on a whole set of data, instead of before just taking a subset of data to analyze.”

Our core product, Savanna, a multi-source analysis solution, leverages the data storage and processing capabilities Hadoop provides. With Savanna’s suite of analytical tools, we can help you make sense of the stored information.

Focusing on big data is akin to the perspective of a sculler rowing upstream

The arc of human development is fundamentally a reflection of the human capacity to gather, store, analyze and act upon information. Transformational leaps in society, economy, culture and science coincide with revolutionary changes in communications and information technologies. While computers and related technologies have radically expanded the human capacity for processing information (and has begun to replace humans entirely in some decision-making), the most important decisions in the life of human societies and enterprises remain in the hands of human beings. The pace of technologies, processes and regulations that drive the creation of big data is outdistancing the development of technologies, processes and practices required to extract understanding and insights in support of effective decision-making. The past is not necessarily prologue in a world beset with wickedly complex problems. Focusing on big data is akin to the perspective of a sculler rowing upstream.

Effective analysis looks beyond the bounds of known and knowable data; extending the reach of discovery, understanding and anticipation to unmapped domains of economic, social and ecological risk and opportunity.

Thetus software is built for this unmapped landscape of risk, opportunity and resilience. Thetus’ core product, Savanna, is a suite of analysis tools that encourage the formulation of knowledge models and tested hypotheses; enable the fusing of structured and unstructured data; and facilitate visualizations and fully-sourced productions for decision-makers.

Thetus provides solutions to organizations with complex and wicked problems, problems devoid of obvious pathways to solutions and subject to dynamic forces that require adaptable and resilient management strategies. Such problems require the kind of modeling, analysis and synthesis that only a well-trained and disciplined human being can perform. Our job is to facilitate that human intervention. Thetus begins with the problem, and considers big data as one type of resource in the hands of a competent team of analysts.

In the final analysis, Thetus answers the question of how to make the most of big data by asking… to what end? Our software facilitates the analysis to help our clients navigate their way to a desired reality by means of model-enabled and adaptive policies and practices. For Thetus, big data is an important resource to help human beings solve complex, wicked problems.

Below is information on the two other presenters.

Nitin Mayande, Co-founder and Chief Scientist of Tellagence – Tellagence is used to organize and analyze public and private data to empower businesses to improve the decision they make in marketing, operations, and investments.

Eimar Boesjes, Chief Operations Officer and Chief Technology Officer at Moonshadow Mobile – Moonshadow Mobile works with large databases, from tens of thousands to hundreds of millions of records to visualize “big data” over maps.

Savanna’s Production Feature:

Analysis is ineffective if it is not shared with the right people at the right time. Successful information sharing ensures that all participants in the analysis cycle have access to the information they need when they need it. Savanna addresses the importance of information sharing with template-driven, drag-and-drop customized reports.

With Savanna’s Production feature you can gather images and information (text, interactive maps, charts and more) related to your analysis for presentation and collaboration. You can create custom annotations to contextualize your analysis and add layers of information to your presentations with all original sources tracked. Production allows you to build, modify, and share compelling custom reports for your analysis.

Make sure you get involved with the Big Data Challenge: How Healthy is Your City? and see how you can showcase your work through the Visualization Gallery.

Below is a description of the festival from their site;

Big Data Week is one of the most unique global platforms of interconnected community events focusing on the social, political, technological and commercial impacts of Big Data. It brings together a global community of data scientists, data technologies, data visualisers and data businesses spanning six major commercial, financial, social and technological sectors.

The festival connects a number of global cities through locally hosted meetups, events, networking functions, data visualisation demo’s, debates, discussion and hackathons. Events are designed to provide a platform to educate, inform and inspire – organised by people who are passionate and knowledgeable about data. We’re a self organising community where anyone is able to host and create an event during the festival; making the our platform completely open and community driven.

Tomorrow is the third annual Government Big Data Forum hosted by Carahsoft and Bob Gourley of CTOvision.com. The forum is held in Washington, D.C. with the goal of advancing the conversation on Big Data technology with industry thought leaders and experts. This year the forum will “examine emerging technologies and concepts designed to address the full spectrum of agency mission needs for Big Data.” With three keynote speeches and a strong list of vendors exhibiting their products this event will definitely be worth while for anyone interested in government analytical tools. If you’re already attending make sure to stop by our booth to see the latest capabilities in our core product, Savanna!

For more information and to register visit the site.

Savanna is a multi-source analysis solution that packages modeling and data fusion capabilities with a suite of analytical tools to accelerate decision-making.

This video demonstrates how Savanna helps develop the analysis around a hypothesis that droughts in Kenya affect Kenyans in terms of economic stability, politics and social welfare.

Thetus Corporation would like you to join us for a webinar highlighting Savanna’s newest capabilities for dealing with dynamic analytical challenges around counter-narcotics, counterterrorism and homeland security.

In this webinar you will learn how Savanna helps users: 

• Connect and organize disparate systems & processes 
• Contextualize and fuse information to visualize problems
• Develop, reuse and share knowledge assets for community use
• Extend capabilities with existing investments for an integrated environment
• Secure analysis with accredited proven infrastructure

Save the date:   March 27, 2013 at 2:00 pm EST

Please register here 

Savanna is a multi-INT analysis suite, delivering exceptional modeling, analysis, visualization, and production results. Savanna builds on existing investments and programs bringing together various analysis techniques to enable faster, more informed decision-making.

In this webinar you will see an overall demonstration of Savanna, a tool actively used throughout the U.S. Federal Government, working through a scenario that analyzes different transnational crime organizations, their varying processes, and the best course of action for countering transnational organized crime. This scenario breaks down two courses of action: interrupting the supply chain at the creation stage and interfering the transportation to consumer nations.

We hope you will join us. If you are unable to attend, please register and we will send you a link to the recorded archive version after the event.

This month we have also decided to participate in and sponsor the Northwest Regional Women in Computing (NWrWIC) event on April 6^th.  The NWrWIC “focuses on empowering and encouraging women to enter the STEM fields particularly computer science” and is supported by the Anita Borg Institute and Grace Hopper Consortium. The conference goal is to “bring together female students from high schools and universities, and join them with university faculty and industry professionals in order to stimulate their interest in computing,” this year’s theme is “The Future of Technology.” The speakers list is quite impressive and  includes, Professor Valerie Barr, Association for Computing Machinery –Women’s Chapter Chair (ACM-W) and Ruthe Farmer of National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT).

Register, participate or sponsor the NWrWIC event.

For local Portlanders, Telle Whitney, president and CEO of the Anita Borge Institute for Women and Technology, is speaking on March 21 at 7pm in Buckley Center Auditorium on the University of Portland campus. Whitney’s speech is titled “Lessons learned: The Journey of One Technical Woman,” more info here.

Lastly, we wanted to say congratulations to a company friend, Amber Case (cofounder of Geoloqi), who just received the Outstanding Young Alumnus Award at Lewis & Clark College of Arts and Sciences. As a Portlander, Amber has been a crucial influencer in the local technology field but in the years she’s reached global status, named by Fast Company as one of the Most Influential Women in Technology in 2010 and featured in Forbes and Wired magazines. Amber “studies the interaction between humans and computers and how relationships with information are changing the way cultures think, act, and understand their worlds,” with National Women’s History’s month theme this year it couldn’t have been a more appropriate time for Amber to receive this honor. Our CEO, Danielle Forsyth, was among the few who were asked to speak personally on behalf of Amber’s many accomplishments in a recognition video shown at the award ceremony.