Structure Data 2014 in NYC: A Quantum Leap

It’s official: LDO is going to be in NYC for Structure Data 2014, where Strategy meets Data. Structure is Gigaom’s event for all things data and it’s really exciting to be able to make it there for the first time, joining 900+ big data practitioners, technologists and executives as they examine how big data can drive business success. If you want to get the bottom line on big data now, from grand new uses to the nuts and bolts of capturing, storing, analyzing and you  serving it,  this is the place to be.

Even though the schedule is not 100% finalized at this point, it’s close and it already looks super interesting. All the latest developments from the technical front, real-world use cases analyzed by organizations ranging from Metlife to the Salvation Army, plus the usual buzz of Gigaom events, where you get to meet and greet some of the world’s leading experts, executives and analysts.

If i had to pick one thing i am most looking forward to though, that would be D-Wave’s CEO Vern Brownell chat with Stacey Higginbotham on the work they do with Google. D-Wave is one of the pioneers in the commercialization of Quantum Computing, a breakthrough in computing so disruptive that it’s unlike anything you can imagine: it could revolutionize the world as we know it.

Quantum Computing is about changing the very substrate of computing from using silicon chips able to represent information as combinations of binary states (1s and 0s) to using molecules able to represent a multitude of states. The promise of Quantum Computing is that with this technology we should be able to develop computers orders of magnitude more powerful than the ones we have today, thus enabling us to solve some problems that are simply non approachable today.

If that was not reason enough to be excited, this is also sort of a homecoming for me. A long-long time ago, when i first set my eyes on research, Quantum Computing was a topic that caught my eye and spurred my imagination. I never went down that road for a number of reasons, and i am happy with my decisions and the places they’ve taken me, but still there’s no denying it feels like an ‘aha’ moment to see Quantum Computing take the stage in an event like Structure Data.

Looking forward.