Data is accumulating rapidly. Our approaches to capturing and analyzing data, as well as in making connections between and drawing conclusions from this data are evolving as well. In this talk, we'll review some of the changes in how data is used and analyzed, highlighting several examples of the power of data analysis outside of the usual suspects: customer needs, production dashboards, etc. We'll look at how data is used to track election violence, movement of people after a natural disaster, and attempts to predict famine and other humanitarian crises before they happen. Rebecca Parsons (CTO at ThoughtWorks) Dr. Rebecca Parsons is ThoughtWorks' Chief Technology Officer. She has more than 20 years' application development experience, in industries ranging from telecommunications to emergent internet services. She has extensive experience leading in the creation of large-scale distributed object applications, services based applications, and the integration of disparate systems. Before coming to ThoughtWorks she worked as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida. She also worked as Director's Post Doctoral Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory researching issues in parallel and distributed computation, genetic algorithms, computational biology and non-linear dynamical systems. She spent her sabbatical from ThoughtWorks working with UNICEF's Innovation Lab in Kampala, Uganda in 2010. Rebecca received a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Economics from Bradley University, a Masters of Science in Computer Science from Rice University and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University.