 Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Kelly with Wikibon.org. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, where we go out to all the events, we extract the signal from the noise, we bring you the best guests. Why are we here? We're here because information quality is a topic that is not talked enough about in our opinion. So theCUBE was very interested in attending this symposium. So what's the symposium all about? Rich Wang is here. He is the director of MIT Information Quality Program. He's a former chief data officer. And he is the founder of this symposium. Rich, thanks very much for, first of all, thanks for having us and welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for inviting me. It's an honor and privilege to be here and talking to the world. So tell us about the Information Quality Program. You started at seven years ago. What was the driver? What was the impetus to start it? We're way back before people were talking about big data. That's actually a very good question. We started the data quality program actually since 1988, about 20 some years ago. And in 1990s, we formalized as a total data quality management program. And we had the first international conference on information quality in 1996. Now, coming to 2000, we realized that the international conference of information quality called ICIQ has a lot of practitioners and a lot of academics. And because the papers are double blind, reviewed by a polling committee, so it ended up most of the professionals, their paper get rejected. And I received an email from one of the leading very top information called practitioners say, it's me, my paper get rejected. I said, sorry, it's a double blind process. So. Don't shoot me. So it triggered me to think about, maybe what I should do is to separate the international conference for academic audience versus industrial symposium for the practitioners. So seven years ago, I started to start the industrial symposium, originally called Information Quality Industry Symposium. And the academic international conference of information quality has started to outsource and found it out to Germany, to France, to Deloitte, Arkansas. They have a master program and PhD program that I help co-founded. Coming back to the information quality symposium, we started to do at MIT annually in July, always in July. And about two years ago, we realized that information quality is essential for big data, for small data, for different data. However, it's not high enough in the original structure. Basically it's like a middle manager position. And that's not good to apply data for the purpose. So I started at, in front of IQ, I put chief data officer, since I was deputy chief data officer in the Pentagon for two years, from 2009 to 2011. So right now it's called CDO IQ symposium, and we're gonna help hold that annually every year. So who attends? Obviously CDOs, you had a CDO event yesterday, so you're attracting a senior level audience, but also the managers that are practitioners are here as well. So talk a little bit about who attends this event. The people who attend this symposium simply put are the trainers for other consultants. Every person that you come here to see, basically they have a consulting practice. The leader of a company in training other people on information quality, or they have their high government officers. So already it's very prestigious group that I invite. And so they come, the speakers that present us, they are all invited, and went through a process to decide who to invite. So for example, we have the BITS group at Washington DC, which is a very strong group. We have- The financial services. Financial services, yeah, financial services. And then we have federal, the board represented the chief data officer and deputy chief data officer both here today, just an example. On the private sector side, we have the CIO of Surinam Khamel, a Wall Street Journal from a major law firm here. And we have a city group. We have John Bottega, who is the chief data officer at Bank of America. Now used to be with the federal, with the board all here. So these are the kind of participants that everyone you see, basically, you will not have the opportunity to talk to them because they just don't go around to talk to people to attend other trading shows. Yeah, so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, after the conference is over, what do you hope attendees are gonna take away from this? What is really, they come here for a few days, they hear some really interesting talks, some panel discussions around data quality, the role of the CDO. What are you hoping that attendees take away from this conference? That's a very good question. What we're hoping for the participants to take away is the current knowledge that has now been disseminated in the field to bring back to the office. And I have a line which is, the participants ought to be able to apply the knowledge they learned from the participants on Monday after they returned to their home. Number one. Number two, we have as an MIT, with a nonprofit symposium, we dictate all the presenters and participants do not do product announcement, do not provide a consulting methodology with the benefits and the conclusion how good it is, and a black box, and here's my business card. None of that. That's number one. Number two, we really wanted to stimulate the participants to be a stakeholder as opposed to a consumer. By stakeholder, I mean they come over here, they contribute their ideas and exchange ideas, research results, practice best practice with the speaker and presenters. So not that you don't want attendees to be kind of passive consumers of the content here, you want them to interact with one another and presenters and really make this a very practical conference. As you said, they can go back one day morning and actually start to implement some of the ideas they've heard here. Yes, indeed, and they're not shy. They're not shy. So for example, I have the president of DEMA here as a participant. DEMA is the Data Administration Management Association. He is a participant. Fantastic. So really it's allowing practitioners from all different levels and all different types of organizations to kind of mingle. Yes, we have public sector people, we have private sector people, private sector we have across all industry segments and in particular, for the last seven years we have three tracks. The government track, the health track and the financial service track. And next year we're going to have based on themes. So depending on the themes that go across the industry. Next on Ritual, thanks very much. Couple hundred people here. Several more, of course, watching in theCUBE. Again, thanks for having us here. Really appreciate you coming to theCUBE, setting up the event. We'll be here over the next two days. I'm Dave Vellante with Jeff Kelly. Really appreciate your invitation and the initiative that you've put behind this. And I want to thank you for doing this. I understand that you didn't get paid. And we wish, we'd like you to come back next year. This is invitation for next year. Thank you very much. We love to do these things. We love the collaboration with great institutions like MIT, we work a lot with folks like Stanford. So it's really a pleasure for us to be here. So thanks again. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back with our next guest. Michael Rappa is here. He's from North Carolina State University and we're going to dig into this issue of information quality and data governance. Keep it right there, this is theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you.