For a while now, I have been waxing lyrical (to those who will listen) about the variety of new tools and analyses available to people who want to prognosticate. If nothing else, the current craze for data within most businesses has resulted in people almost literally swimming around in the stuff without an awful lot of an idea about what to do with it, and while this has lead to some unspeakably shambolic practices (those who know me will likely have heard me on my hobby horse about proving models with actual experimentation) it has also opened up new horizons for people like me.

So, I’m delighted to have been invited to give a talk I submitted to the Bartech Tech2020 conference, this coming week in London – the first meeting of this particular group, there is a great line-up of speakers, all of whom are going to be reading the runes and describing their vision of the year 2020. Wonderfully, the various talks will be recorded and available, so there will be significant opportunity come the year 2020 to look back and groan loudly at the errors and omissions that will have piled up nicely by that point.

There are some brilliant speakers lined up, and I have to confess to being eager to particularly hear from this lot (in no particular order):

  • Zoe Cunningham – the old refrain, “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, has never been more true than now. It’s also one of the most difficult things to set right and predict;
  • David Wood – working in healthcare, I’m incredibly interested in David’s talk, and am certain that what we will call healthcare in another ten year’s time will in many ways bear little resemblance to what is practised now;
  • Simon Riggs – in all honesty, I’m hoping he’s going to be talking at least in part about homomorphic encryption because I just read the Gentry paper recently and it’s fascinating, but there is so much to come in this space – particularly now that data is so large and non-local that all sorts of new strategies are needed.

I’m going to attempt to tweet through most of the conference in low volume, probably on #tech2020, and look forward to putting a few more faces to names from Bartech.