WS3: Professional Systemics through Applied Visual Analytics and Artificial Intelligence on Big Data

Dr. Andreas Maniatis has been an active member of the Greek ICT industry for more than twenty-five years. Today he is a partner and Commercial Director at CyberStream LTD, a leading systems integrator and software manufacturer of state-of-the-art tools and solutions. He also serves as Head of the Business Intelligence – Visual Analytics Unit of the company, the later being the appointed reseller for the TIBCO Spotfire Visual Analytics Platform.Dr. Maniatis has participated in various projects in both the Public and the Private Sectors, where he has held positions ranging from developer to project manager to senior IT strategy consultant to team manager. He has also collaborated with the National Technical University of Athens and the General Secretariat of Research and Technology in many R&D programs in the European community. He is actively tutoring courses on Big Data Visualization and Analytics in numerous Academic Institutions.Dr. Maniatis holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens and an MSc from the same institution. His domains of interest include Software Lifecycle Management, Data Warehouses and OLAP, Data Mining and Decision Support Systems, Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, with specialization in the Visual Representation and the online, Interactive Exploration and Analysis of very large data sets (Visual Analytics and Big Data). He has published numerous papers in prestigious scientific journals and international conferences. 

Professional Systemics through Applied Visual Analytics and Artificial Intelligence on Big Data
In the last few years, three key factors have dramatically changed the approach analysts have towards data exploration and analysis:

• Available data volumes have exponentially increased, as they have been fed from additional, massive sources of new and complex information such as the search engines and social media environments,
• Business analysts have introduced new systematic approaches to the process of decision making across the organization, emphasizing in questions such as “why” and “what next”, as opposed to the simpler “what” and “who”, answered by contemporary Business Intelligence tools, and
• Artificial Intelligence has been revived, thanks to the abundance of data, the extreme processing power now available even in smartphones, and the advances in data science, neural nets and algorithms.

This convergence of data and analysis is ushering in a new business analytics model that also redefines the functional specifications supporting tools must possess, so as to answer within split seconds questions that lead to mission critical decisions. Business Analytics, a term that eloquently describes this new paradigm, are largely based on the most recent advances in the Information Visualization and the Human-Computer Interaction areas. In addition, Artificial Intelligence has re-emerged from the eighties, this time not only as an Academic discipline but also a driving force in real life applications powered by Machine Learning and Deep Learning, such as autonomous driving cars, forecasting, etc.Visual Interactive Analytics and Data Science Platforms, such as TIBCO Spotfire, constitute state-of-the-art frameworks that drive data exploration to a completely new level in terms of usability, accuracy and on time delivery of answers.The current workshop will place the terms introduced above within the relative real application context, especially under the focus of Professional Systemics and Business Intelligence.