Catch Google “Big Picture” Data Leader Viégas at The Tech Agenda

The big idea behind our next big innovation conference, the Tech Agenda 2015, is deceptively simple.

Get a bunch of smart people who are building the future of their industries. Separate the brilliant from the bogus, and find out what’s really driving change in technology, business, and society. Wrap it all up with bold predictions for what you should pay attention to—or ignore—in the year ahead.

It’s essentially your crib sheet for what matters in the fastest-moving, most exciting parts of our economy. Give us an afternoon, and you’ll be able to tell when someone’s blowing smoke and dropping empty buzzwords at that next important meeting.

We’ve already given you a glimpse of the all-star speakers we’ve recruited for this event, which is happening on the afternoon of Dec. 2 at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology in Boston. They include Sophie Vandebroek, the president of Xerox Innovation Group; Helen Greiner, co-founder of iRobot and founder of drone startup CyPhy Works; and Lita Nelsen, the director of technology transfer at MIT.

Today, we’re adding another big one: Fernanda Viégas, one of the leaders of Google’s “Big Picture” data visualization research group. If you haven’t seen her work before, prepare to be mesmerized. She helps build tools that give life to huge amounts of data, letting you watch the rise and fall of musical genres, the flow of wind patterns across the U.S., or the pulsating paths traced by denial-of-service network attacks around the globe.

It’s the kind of work that takes the hot air out of Big Data and makes its impact tangible. Which is why Viégas’s path has included the MIT Media Lab, IBM’s Visual Communication Lab, co-founding the data research company Flowing Media, and now Google’s research team.

We’ll be adding more speakers and showing off more of our agenda as the date gets closer—look out for interactive discussions that give you an innovator’s up-close view of e-commerce, digital marketing, startup investing, and much more.

But for now, make sure to get your tickets to lock in the best prices—the Early Bird rate expires Oct. 9. And if you’re a student or a startupper, we’ve also got you covered with big discounts. See you Dec. 2.

Author: Curt Woodward

Curt covered technology and innovation in the Boston area for Xconomy. He previously worked in Xconomy’s Seattle bureau and continued some coverage of Seattle-area tech companies, including Amazon and Microsoft. Curt joined Xconomy in February 2011 after nearly nine years with The Associated Press, the world's largest news organization. He worked in three states and covered a wide variety of beats for the AP, including business, law, politics, government, and general mayhem. A native Washingtonian, Curt earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA. As a past president of the state's Capitol Correspondents Association, he led efforts to expand statehouse press credentialing to online news outlets for the first time.