The Fifth Elephant 2014

How does one go about creating interactive real-time visualisations with rapidly changing data? This talk is about our experiences in designing the CNN-IBN and Bing election results page.

Outline

The CNN-IBN Microsoft Election Analytics Center, which you can see the live visualisations at www.bing.com/elections, served over 10 million requests on election day.

This includes real-time filtering of the election commission results – based on turnouts, margins, computations of anti-incumbency factors, alliance groupings, etc.

This talk is about the engineering from Gramener that went into making the site fast and responsive.

Requirements

We’ll be talking about databases, gzip, HTTP, Javascript, nginx, Python, rsync, etc. Some familiarity with these would help.

Speaker bio

Anand is the chief data scientist at Gramener. He explores data stories visually with Python and Javascript.

He blogs at http://www.s-anand.net/

Links

• http://blog.gramener.com/1731/scaling-real-time-visualisations-2
• http://blog.gramener.com/1763/tech-behind-the-2014-results-page
• http://blog.gramener.com/1783/optimising-the-2014-election-results-page
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAlZ0uJnqkA
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx4sN9bfb2A
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLiwCKpoW1Q