MISSOULA, MONTANA, 18 February 2014 – GCS, a geoanalytics firm, has launched the Big Data Lecture Series Sponsored by GCS, an annual event that will feature thought leaders in Big Data technologies from a variety of industries.
The inaugural lecture, “Big Data in Electoral Politics and Beyond: Revealing the Science of Political Science,” will be presented by Dan Wagner, CEO of Civis Analytics and strategist in the 2012 Obama re-election campaign.
This first Big Data Lecture will be held at 7 pm MST on February 24, 2014, at the University of Montana’s Montana Theatre in Missoula. The lecture is free and open to the public.
“Dan Wagner and his team revolutionized electoral politics in 2012 by applying Big Data analytical processes in the Obama re-election campaign,” said Dr. Alex Philp, President of GCS. “Dan’s company, Civis Analytics, now applies Big Data technology to solve challenges facing organizations in government, corporations, academia and politics. This is a story that needs to be heard.”
In 2012, Dan Wagner and his team of Big Data scientists changed politics forever by developing and using advanced Big Data analytics to support the Obama re-election efforts. Rather than focus solely on large demographic blocks, Wagner developed new analytical tools that mined massive electoral and social media data sets to identify likely Obama voters. They pioneered Big Data methods and techniques to determine individual voter preference at a level of detail never seen before in a national campaign, feeding predictive models to determine voter outcome.
“Dan Wagner’s talk is the first in what will become an annual event in Missoula where GCS strives to inform students, faculty and the public of the potential for Big Data analytics to help organizations gain new insights into their operations,” said Philp. “As the world becomes more interconnected through the electronic devices we use every day, the importance of Big Data processing will only grow.”
GCS is an acknowledged worldwide leader in location-based Big Data analytical processing, pioneering the application of streaming analytics to extract meaningful information from Big Data in motion. GCS has recently announced that it will integrate its geospatial streaming analytical capabilities to develop services on top of the IBM Watson cognitive computing engine.