Abstract: “Big Data” is often seen as a panacea for a variety of corporate challenges ranging from market expansion to new product definition. As the scale and shape of our data sources increase in magnitude, “big data” brings with it a set of big challenges in the areas of privacy, provenance, and propagation. In this talk we’ll look at what we can learn from other industries and what emergent technologies such as digital currencies offer to address this problem space.

Short Bio: Hal Stern is Executive Director of Applied Technology at Merck & Company, where his group builds disruptive services and architectures for data ingest, data science, and very large-scale solvers. Current interests include the use of crypto currencies to improve consent and federation of health care data distribution, applications of graph algorithms, and improvements in safely and reliably parsing unstructured data.

Hal was previously a VP at Juniper Networks and spent more than 20 years at Sun Microsystems in a variety of technical leadership roles. He holds a BSE degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University and holds multiple issued and filed patents in the areas of security, identity, user experience, and networking.

Hal has been a frequent speaker at industry and technical conferences, and has co-authored three books, 'Professional WordPress: Design and Development' (3rd edition, 2015), 'Blueprints for High Availability' (2nd edition, 2001) and 'Managing NFS and NIS' (2nd edition, 1994). He is an active Kiva microlender and digital photographer, and may be found on the left wing with his adult ice hockey team, cheering for the NJ Devils, playing bass guitar, or damaging public golf courses.