Big Data Congress 2016 to take place in Saint John, New Brunswick

The fourth annual Big Data Congress 2016 (BDC2016), co-hosted by T4G Limited and Techimpact, will be held in Saint John, New Brunswick from Oct. 17-19, at the Saint John Trade and Convention Centre, and promises to present a wide array of speakers discussing Big Data and the Industrial Internet of Things.
Billing itself as North America’s largest customer-focused data technology conference, BDC2016 will address the range of industries that stand to be impacted by the Industrial Internet of Things, including food production, resource management, energy, health care, government services, urban spaces and social development.
Delivering the keynote address will be Director of MIT’s Human Dynamics and Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, Alex “Sandy” Pentland, whose book “Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread— The Lessons from a New Science” outlines his theory that we can understand the evolution of culture through data and statistics.
Another of the events, called Big Data: Transforming Patient Care, will explore how healthcare is being affected by technology, as well as how data can be used to transform patient care, clinical treatment and delivery, and the impact that population-level genomics might have on healthcare.
The Transforming Patient Care event will be hosted by Saint John-based heart surgeon and healthcare researcher Ansar Hassan, who moonlights as a stand-up comedian, and will feature Jamie Heywood, co-founder and chairman of Cambridge, Massachussets-based PatientsLikeMe, an online community where patients can compare notes on living with disease and offer researchers the chance to learn more about those conditions.
Also featured will be Tyler Wish, CEO and co-founder of Sequence Bio, a St. John’s, Newfoundland-based company that is setting out to study the genetic profiles of 100,000 Newfoundlanders and Labradorians.
Founded in 2013, Sequence Bio raised a US$3 million seed financing round from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Data Collective this past August, and now has a staff of 15.
Sequence Bio claims that 1,000 people from the province have agreed to participate in the project, but has much farther to go if it wants to create a significant genetic database comparable to the work that the company deCODE has been doing in Iceland.
deCODE has sequenced the full genomes of 2,636 Icelanders, and gathered less detailed genotyping microarrays of 100,000 others, which could lead to breakthroughs in the treatment of a variety of diseases.
Also on the Transforming Patient Care panel will be human-machine interface expert Erik Scheme, Assistant Professor in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of New Brunswick, as well as being the New Brunswick Innovation Research Chair in Medical Technologies at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, and an instructor and advisor for the Dr. J. Herbert Smith Centre for Technology Management and Entrepreneurship.
BDC2016 will also look at how the Industrial Internet of Things proposes to create long-term economic value by applying Big Data to real-world settings, such as the supply chain, urban life, traffic, workplace settings like offices or factories, as well as home-based and personal technologies.
Also on the speaker list is Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Kate Darling, who gave one of the more memorable presentations at this year’s C2MTL conference in Montreal concerning ethics and robotics.
With a list of presenters representing companies as diverse as Amazon Web Services, RtTech Software, Emera Inc., GE Canada, McCain Foods and the Institute for Ocean Research Enterprise, BDC2016 looks to pack a full agenda for anyone with an interest in the Industrial Internet of Things.