The Fifth Elephant 2014

Have you ever wondered how Cisco does Customer Segmentation? What is Cisco’s technology stack to deal with Big Data? What tools and technologies are adopted to bring best-of-breed algorithms from data science to inform on the problem of identifying segments in the audience. How does supervised and semi-supervised machine-learning along with Bayesian predictive analytics combine to produce a very interesting cocktail of technology solutions?

What is the system design and lambda architecture that we use to successfully deploy the solution to scale?

What is the practical business use of audience segmentation? What applications can derive benefit from Audience Segmentation?

I will provide answers to the above questions and many more in this demo plus talk on Cisco’s Audience Segmentation solution.

Outline

Audience Segmentation is a very important practical necessity in pretty much every field. Whether it is internet subscribers or paytv subscribers there is an intense need from the advertisers and service providers to know who is living in a household and what their demography profiles are and what their interests are?

An ensemble of techniques which include advanced linear and non-linear dimensionality reduction, unsupervised learning algorithms, bayesian predictive analytics and expert systems come together to form a compelling pragmatic data science solution stack for the big data environment.

Requirements

Some background knowledge of Big Data tools and data science algorithms like Bayes theorem, machine-learning algorithms, knowledge-based systems. Some background knowledge about the business requirements of Audience Segmentation. Some exposure to Mahout would be helpful.

Speaker bio

I am Prabhakar Srinivasan. I work as a data scientist at Cisco. I have invented a unique technique to do customer segmentation which works for the PayTv domain of Cisco products running on Big data infrastructure. I wish to share this success story with the community with the hope that others who are trying to solve a similar problem can gain some practical insight on doing data science on big data stack that really gives business value.

I have successfully deployed my invention in Europe for some Telecom giants. I have presented this technique during talks in Monaco during Cisco’s internal conferences. It is time to share this success story with the wider Big data community.