The Fifth Elephant 2012

Fieldata ( http://fieldata.org ) is an initiative aimed at promoting data-driven decision-making in the non-profit sector in India; including NGOs, governmental organisations, and academic institutions.

We provide: (a) Real-time data-collection through a variety of mobile-based and web-based channels, (b) distributed, online storage of a variety of data, with transaction-based and secure technologies for the exchange of information, and (c) Analysis and visualisation for multi-variate data, graphs, GIS, plus semantic search and recommendation.

Outline

We will describe the goals of Fieldata in detail, covering our mission, the current scope of the product, and details of ongoing projects. A brief description of the open-source technologies that we base our work on will also be included.

We hope to attract the interest of attendees from non-profit organisations, as well as the attention of technically-savvy people looking to make a real difference in the world.

Requirements

None, besides a minimal familiarity with data-collection, and analysis techniques

Speaker bio

Gora Mohanty has a doctorate in astrophysics but nowadays finds software and information technologies more to his taste. His expertise lies in the area of application architecture, Information retrieval, analysis, and visualization, application development on hand-held
devices, processing of large data sets using multi-variate analysis. Optimization techniques including Bayesian methods, neural networks, and genetic algorithms.

Additional interests are in geographical information systems (GIS) and associated location technology, Indian language computing, particularly in the areas of spell-checking, language-neutral interfaces, and optical character recognition (OCR).

He is part of the FOSS community in India and elsewhere, participating locally in activities of the Indian Linux Users Group, Delhi, where he has been an office-bearer since 2006.

Links

• http://fieldata.org