Tom Reilly, CEO, Cloudera and Khalid Al-Kofahi, VP of Research & Development, Thomson Reuters gave the opening keynote on one of the hottest public concerns – fake news. In their talk titled "Becoming smarter about credible news" they described the solution prepared by their joint effort. Khalid mentioned that an independent survey found that today 20% of news stories are breaking first on Twitter. So, social media is clearly a valuable source of breaking news as well as for additional information on a currently running news story. However, social media is also filled with fake news, advertisements disguised as news, rumors, etc.

Last week the Data Science community had a major event – Strata Hadoop World 2017 at San Jose. The over-arching theme across all talks and the expo was that the focus is increasingly shifting from storing and processing Big Data in an efficient way, to applying traditional and new machine learning techniques to drive higher value from the data at hand. Even as the limelight shifts from Big Data to Machine Learning (and more advanced aspects like Deep Learning), from an implementation perspective, distributed and scalable processing stays dominant as most of the popular ML models have an insatiable appetite for input data and compute power. Mike Olson, CSO and Chairman, Cloudera talked about "The machine-learning renaissance". Most of the fundamental techniques for ML and AI were invented in 1960s and 1970s.