 Morning everyone. As Stephen says, I'm Andy I'm a Research Program Director at EGISERV and I'll be your host for the rest of the day so it's up to me to steer us through the talks we've got, encourage discussion and so on. Thanks to Stephen for that introduction, always does it very well. Can I add my welcome both to those of you in the room and to those of you on the live stream? Yn y pethau sydd wedyn yn ei wneud, mae'n fwy o gweithio'r cymdeithasol. Rwy'n gweithio fod yn gweithio'r cymdeithasol, o'r pethau sydd wedi'u gweithio'r cymdeithasol, ond mae gennym ddim yn ei ffordd o'r cymdeithasol. Rwy'n gweithio'r cymdeithasol, wedi gweithio'r cymdeithasol. Yn y byddi'r ffordd o'u cynnwys, rwy'n gwaith beth o'i gweithio'r cymdeithasol,киwch oed angen i gyntaf y dyfodwyr i'r dda, mae'n rhan o'r ddanion i'r ddechrau arall y ddu i'n mynd gwrthoedd i'r hefyd. Rwy'n gwneud yn digwydd o'r ddweud o'r sgol ychydigion o hefyd o'r dyfodd i'r ddu i, o'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Sy'r tyf несколько o'r ddweud, Ac mae'n ddweud i'n hynny o hollu'r ddweud o ddweudol. Felly rydyn ni'n fawr i'r ffordd rwy'n i'n ddigusio i'r ffordd o'r gaf y ffordd ar y gaf yng nghymru i ddweud o'r cyfnod maen nhw'n fath o'r ddweud. Felly o'r ffordd o'r ddweud, rydym yn hanes i'r methu i ffordd o'r rhai gyda'r heifftu hynny o'r bŵau a'r ddweud o'r ffordd o'r gaf, oedd yne nes ffordd o'r gaf, rwy'n gwybod i'n rhaid i'r ddweud o'r gaf. Felly, nid ydych chi'n gweithio o'r cyfrân gyda'r ysgapol yw'r yma'r wahanol, o'r dewis o'r byth o'r feld, y bod yng ng brakingol yn gweithio'n cymru. Ym eich cerdd honno, geidiwch i gyd i gael ei gweithio'r yma. Mae'r llwyddoedd yn golygu sianol gyda dda ei golygu edrych gan y registrasion arall, yn gennym yr adnod latryn. Fanydd yi ac yn ystafell â'r bwysig, after the event tonight, the cloakroom is staying open until something like 11 o'clock this evening, so you don't need to rush to pick up your coats or your bags or whatever during the drinks reception, you can do all of that afterwards. Coffee, tea breaks, lunch breaks, all in the big room upstairs, again you've probably found that already this morning, but that's where lunch is going to be served. Drinks reception, we'll take a view on where that's held, it'll either be out in the medicinal herb garden, which is where we've always managed to do it in the past and it's very, very nice being able to go out there at the end of the day, but if the weather's not up to it, we'll be in the Dorchester library which is upstairs, so we'll take a view on that probably during the final tea break and I'll let you know where the drinks reception is going to be at that point. Now, can I just, I just want to do a couple of quick shows of hands, so Stephen said this was the 8th symposium, I thought it was the 7th actually, but whatever. How many of you are here for, how many of you have been to a symposium before and had you served symposium before? Okay, so that's probably about a third of the room for those of you watching on the live stream, if you're on the live stream, obviously you can't take part with a show of hands, but if you want to raise your hands, that's up to you if you've watched the stream before, I don't mind. So while I've got you raising your hands, let me just do a couple of other things. How many of you work for an educational institution or an educational organisation? Okay, so that's probably a good half of you, perhaps a little bit more. So then just to give everyone a chance to raise their hands, how many of you don't work for an educational institution? It should be the other half, I presume. Okay, cool. How many of you work in IT services? Okay, again that's probably getting on for half, maybe a third to a half. And how many would call yourselves researchers? Okay, so a lot fewer of those, that doesn't surprise me, but it's good to see those of you here that are researchers, because clearly big data, you know, one of the clear places where big data has a role to play in the education spaces around research, so it's very good to see you here. We want to make this as interactive a day as possible, so please ask questions of all the speakers, challenge them in any way you want. We have had, almost had arguments here last year around aspects of the cloud, so very happy for that kind of thing to happen, but this is your chance to ask questions of the speakers, so please take an opportunity to do that, both here in the plenary sessions, but also over coffee, tea breaks and over lunch and so on. You'll probably notice there is Wi-Fi. If you haven't, there's Wi-Fi, I think it's called RCP. There is no password, but you do have to bring up a web browser and there's some sort of sign-in before you actually get on the Wi-Fi. For those of you on Twitter, there is a hashtag which is behind me, eSIM12, so please tweet as we're going through the day. For those of you on the stream, if you want to ask questions, then you can either do that on Twitter and Lisa is going to be monitoring Twitter, so please do that on the hashtag on Twitter. For those of you, or the alternative is the forum that's associated with the live feed, you're welcome to ask questions there as well. Last bit of housekeeping, I think. We have an exhibition space upstairs, so if you want to find out more about the kinds of services we offer, then please take an opportunity to look at those stands upstairs. I think we do a lot of great stuff for education, so again this is a good opportunity for you to find out more about that kind of stuff. In particular, the education cloud, which is what we've been building over the last year or so, growing out of the work we did as part of the university modernisation fund and the UMF cloud pilot, there will be a demo of that at lunchtime given by a combination of Matt and Charlie who are down the frontier. So if you're interested in seeing a live demo of our education cloud, please take that opportunity at lunchtime. Right, I have got about five minutes and I just wanted to talk to you a little bit about big data. So you've probably heard 2012 is touted as the year of big data. In practice I suspect that means it's the year of big data hype and I certainly hope this event does not fall into that hype space. I've been to a couple of big data events this year and my gut feeling has been that they are big on kind of the possibilities and the theory but they're relatively low on practical experience and what people are actually doing with this stuff. I hope today will be different. I think we've got quite a good mix of perspectives from some of the theory and so on but also from people who've actually been building stuff with big data. So I hope today is going to be different. If you think we haven't succeeded in that, let us know in the feedback forms when you leave but I really hope today is a little bit different. So what do we mean by big data? Well those of you that saw any of the emails that came out advertising this event will know that we kind of took as our starting point for this the definition that Ed Dumbhill of O'Reilly Radar put together in a piece. He wrote a shortish piece. I still think it's one of the best kind of introductory pieces to big data. I think it was called what is big data. If you Google for that phrase you'll certainly find it. So he defined it as data that exceeds the processing capacity of conventional database systems. Data is too big, it moves too fast or it doesn't fit the structures of your database architectures. To gain value from this data you must choose an alternative way to process it. So you'll see from that the three words that are commonly associated with big data and we'll probably hear more about this as we go through the day. Volume, velocity, variety. I'm not going to say any more about that because I'm pretty sure our opening keynote from Rob will say some of that. But those are typically this kind of three keywords that are associated with big data and the challenges that big data brings with it. I think it is worth noting that big data refers not just to the data itself and the challenges of managing and storing and curating and that kind of thing. And those are areas where I think the education community has quite a lot of experience of thinking about those kinds of issues. It's also about how you analyse that data, how you find the nuggets of information hidden within that data. So it's very much about data analytics and so on. So as I say, I think there tends to be a focus on the data word of big data within education and government. That's been my sense as I've spoken to people about the possibility of speaking at this event. I think there's potential confusion with the open data agenda, particularly in the government space. I think big data is different. So big data might be open data, but it might not be. I think that there's a difference there and I think there is some confusion around that. The other way of thinking about big data is kind of with the kinds of tools that one associates with big data. Things like Hadoop, pretty sure we'll hear more about that as we go through the day. No SQL tools like MongoDB, even older technologies like BerkeleyDB and so on. Analytics tools such as R, there's a kind of tool set emerging which is very much associated with this space and I'm guessing we're going to hear some of that today. That said, I think it's easy to focus on the technology and not to think about the bigger picture about what you're trying to achieve with this stuff and I think it's important that we don't focus solely on the technology around this stuff. The other thing is this emerging role of the data scientist. It seems to me that role is growing up as this whole thing around big data emerges. There was a blog post from Adam Cooper at Cetus the other day. I don't think he came up with this phrase, but he described a data scientist as being a business analyst who lives in California. That's somewhat flippant obviously. I think there is a new role emerging and I think it's someone who is technical, who likes visualising stuff, who likes telling stories around data. I think there's a key set of skills in that sort of space. From an education point of view, as people who provide teaching and learning and so on, it seems to me there is potentially a role for us there in encouraging those kinds of skill sets, either specifically within particular courses or indeed more generally. What are we going to hear about today? Well, big data uses. We're going to hear about people who are using big data to undertake research and we're going to hear from people in physics, in clinical practice, in genomics. We're going to hear about big data in society and certainly open data in society, putting data at the heart of government. We're going to hear about approaches to big data. We're going to hear about storage. We're going to hear about curation and so on. I think we've got a wide variety of perspectives. I certainly hope we have. We're going to hear about all of those things today. I was hoping we were also going to hear about big data as it relates to learning analytics. I didn't manage to find a speaker on that. I think that's probably a failing on my part rather than there not being anyone out there who could have spoken about it. I do think there's an interesting application of big data, potentially, around learning analytics and how we track users and monitors users' progress or learners' progress through our systems and so on. I do think that's an area that we should be thinking about, but unfortunately I haven't actually got a speaker here today to talk about this. Why am I interested? Why is Edgeserv interested? Stephen touched on this. Our work on the education cloud clearly, and as I say, that grew out of the UMF program of activity, the UMF Cloud Pilot, but clearly a lot of big data activity is being undertaken on cloud infrastructures for the same reasons that you would use cloud infrastructure to do other things, rapid scalability, horizontal scaling, rapid provisioning, all those kinds of things. We see our education cloud as potentially one place where big data type activities could take place. We've got something like 40 institutions currently trialling our education cloud. We'd love to see more of you on there. If you're interested in thinking about big data applications on our cloud, we'd be more than happy to talk to you and more than happy to talk to you today or at any point in the future. The other thing is that we're building the cloud out of our Swindon data centre, relatively new data centre in Swindon. If you were wanting to think about building big data infrastructure yourselves, dedicated hardware to do big data type applications, then our Swindon data centre would be a great home for that kind of activity. Again, if you're interested in that kind of thing, find someone today. There's loads of people around. We'll have a conversation about that. That's really kind of where we're coming from. We also think it's a great topic and we always try and focus the symposia on topics that we think are of interest to the community, current topics of interest to the community. I've probably run slightly over, apologise, we'll have to eat five minutes into the first coffee break. I want to bring us to our first opening keynote, Rob Anderson. Rob is CTO, EMEA, the Iceland Storage Division, EMC. EMC I'm sure is known to all of you, but I'm sure Rob will say more about it. Rob's work has led him to engage with a wide range of users, media and entertainment, life sciences, telecoms, finance, energy, other market sectors. He was part of the development team that led to Iceland's industry-leading 1FS clustered file system, formerly health senior roles at Amazon and Equator Technologies, and Rob is going to talk to us about and implications for storage. So, over to Rob.