The busiest day this far. The day started with a keynote session, featuring among others Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of World Wide Web. He spoke out against the SOPA and PIPA laws, coincidentally on the same day that Wikipedia, Google and other sites went black in a protest against the proposed US censorship laws. He encouraged everyone to mail their representative to denounce the laws.
Then he procede to discuss the Semantic Web, and how data can be aggregated from many sources but must be tracked back to it’s origin.
The next speaker was Manoj Saxema, the General Manager of the newly founded IBM Watson Solutions Group. He talked about IBM’s plans to commercialize Watson. The first target is the medical fields, where Watson can help doctors in diagnosing patients. The next step is financial institutions and insurance companies.
He also mention that 90% of all data in the world was produced in the last two years, and that 80% of that information is unstructured, saved in documents, spreadsheets, etc. Watson is designed to work with unstructured data like that.
Finally Andy Miller, CEO and President of Polycom, talked about video conferencing, social functionality and mobile, and how the younger workforce demand access to that technology.
The it was off to sessions.
BP303 – I Smell a RAT — Rapid Application Testing, by Peter Presnell. This was a very interesting session. I got plenty of ideas and inspiration of things to do after I get back home.
BP101 – Adminblast 2012 by the always excellent and entertaining Paul Mooney. Even as a developer I always walk away with tons of useful tips from his Adminblast sessions, and this year was no exception.
AD112 – What’s New in the IBM Lotus Domino Objects: Version 8.5.3 in Demos, featuring James Cooper and Elizabeth Sawyer (both of IBM). A good session, with a few interruptions that slowed down the tempo somewhat. One of the most interesting new functions is agent.RunWithDocumentContext(), a way to pass and retrieve data from another agent. Previously we developers had to use a profile document or similar hack to get the same functionality.
BP121 – Performance Programming, by Andrew Pollack. Yet another very interesting session. This one covered different issues that can slow down your Lotus Notes applications, and showed different techniques to work around this.
After this it was off to get ready for the party at Seaworld. It had been raining some earlier in the day, and I think some long-time ‘spherians were worried about a repeat of the 2007 party at Animal Kingdom, when it was pouring down rain. But the rain stopped and I had a good time. My favorites were as always the sharks and the dolphins. I am not a big roller-coaster fan…