Strata HadoopWorld Fall 2016 postmortem: Maybe AI's the future, but can we make the data science work?

Given all the hype over artificial intelligence (AI) these days, at first glance it would seem surprising that it appeared as almost an afterthought at Strata last week. The research lab will be home to a 512-qubit quantum computer built by Canadian company D-Wave Systems. There were a handful of product announcements, like Maana, which added semantic search-like capabilities in its newest release of its knowledge management platform for resource-intensive industries like oil and gas; and Splunk, which grafted machine learning to its offerings for identifying and resolving incidents from IT system log files. And in a keynote talk entitled "Connected Eyes," Microsoft's Joseph Sirosh spoke of a project with India's leading eye institute that applied machine learning over large patient populations to improve outcomes for eye surgery. But this obscures the bigger picture.