Hilary Mason, Chief Scientist of bit.ly, on how to find good uses for #BigData

... A couple weeks ago, we were lucky to have Hilary Mason in town. Hilary is the Chief Scientist of bit.ly, the world-famous URL shortener. Bit.ly may seem like a simple service, however, when done at such a large scale there is much more behind the scenes. There's also a lot of neat data to play with.

Hilary spoke about some of the challenges and lessons from her work trying to derive meaningful uses from the mass of data that flows through bit.ly. She spoke about the history of bit.ly, some of the philosophy of analyzing time-series data, and some cool engineering tricks. She even gave demos of three internal tools at bit.ly that will be released as products in the next few months (really cool stuff!).

Here are the slides: Short URLs, Big Fun: Understanding the World in Realtime, by Hilary Mason.

For those interested in learning more about Analytics and Data Science, Hilary suggested a few introductory books:

• Drew Conway's and John Myles White's Machine Learning for Hackers