We had a couple of excellent speakers join us in July 2016 – Jonny Press from AquaQ Analytics and Bob Harper representing ODI Belfast.
Jonny Press, Director, AquaQ Analytics
Jonny Press is a Director at AquaQ Analytics and is responsible for solution delivery. AquaQ Analytics is a Belfast company who specialise in kdb+ and Java development primarily for clients in capital markets. They have been running for 5 years and grown from a headcount of 3 to 50. Jonny has been working with kdb+ technology for 12 years and has designed and implemented solutions to process and analyze huge volumes of data in real-time for multiple banks, hedge funds, exchanges and regulators, and has recently implemented kdb+ based solutions for IoT applications.
What did he talk about?
Financial institutions don’t always get it right, but they do seem to agree on one thing- to use kdb+ to capture, store and analyze the massive volumes of market data they have to deal with daily. This talk will give an overview of kdb+ and discuss the reasons for its success along with applicability outside of the finance realm, with a particular focus on IoT. We will also show how it can be interfaced with complementary technologies such as R and MongoDB as part of a Big Data ecosystem.
Bob Harper, ODI Belfast
ODI Belfast, part of the Open Data Institute’s global Node network, was formed in 2015, providing a local linkage to the fantastic expertise and resources of the ODI. ODI Belfast is committed to developing the economic, social and environmental benefits of open data throughout all of Northern Ireland.
The Northern Ireland Open Government Network is an alliance of individual citizens and representatives of voluntary/community organisations with the vision To contribute to delivering a more open, transparent and accountable government that empowers citizens to shape decisions that impact their lives.
What did he talk about?
Elections NI || Where did your vote go? In Northern Ireland, we’re lucky (?) to have one of the most democratic and interesting election systems – the Single Transferrable Vote (STV). We also have a relatively small electorate and our electoral organisation so the potential to gather together this electoral data and produce real-time results is within easy reach, but sometimes the detail between voting day and the conclusion of the count is lost.
That’s what ODI Belfast and the Open Government Network did during the 2016 Assembly Elections. Crowdsourcing results from each stage of the count as it happened over two days allowed active voters, candidates, anoraks, and fence-sitters to get more insight into what happened to ballots after they left the polling station, including some nifty visualisation on electionsni.org, plus a host of open data to allow anyone to use election data.