When we first heard about Innovative Enterprise and its Big Data Innovation Summit Boston back in March, we knew this would be a non-vertical specific big data event to watch and follow. The Big Data Innovation Summit taking place at the Westin Copley Place in Boston's Back Bay, September 12-13, includes the largest gathering of Fortune 500 business executives leading Big Data initiatives and is billed as targeting 800+ senior execs (81% are from orgs with more than 300 employees), featuring 40+ educational sessions, panels and hands-on workshops. The 80+ speakers include leading data scientists, engineering, architecture & big data analytics leaders and marketers, represent industry heavyweights including AT&T, CERN, Dell, GE, HP, IBM, LinkedIn, NASA, Netflix, PayPal, Salesforce.com, Sears, Walmart and Yahoo.

A closer look at the jam-packed session schedule reveals many flavors of big data ranging from innovation to analytics, marketing, visualization as well as Hadoop (and beyond) as well as interactive/lab sessions for techies. The Summit schedule is comprised of 6 tracks with up to seven mostly 30 minute sessions per track running concurrently on Thursday with 5 track-agnostic sessions on Friday. The annual Big Data Innovation Awards recognizing big data achievements within the data science community takes place Friday morning as well. Here are a few of our favorites: 

• Big Data Platform at the World's Largest Fan-to-Fan Ticket Marketplace [Sastry Malladi – Chief Architect, Stub Hub]
• In-Memory Computing will Change Everything You Know About Business [Jon Webster – VP, Product Marketing at GridGain]
• Monetizing Big Data with Analytics [Jeff Veis – Vice President, Solutions at HP Autonomy]
• Big Data Innovation and Crowdsourcing – Will They Make a Happy Couple? [Rinat Sergeev – Data Scientist, NASA Tournament Lab]
• Mobile Big Data Insights [Yanling Zhang – Head of Merchandising Insights, Nokia]
• Metrics, Monkeys & Marketing: Lessons on Using Big Data from MailChimp [John Foreman – Chief Data Scientist, MailChimp]
• Big Data Innovations and Applications at NASA [Nikunj Oza – Data Science Leader at NASA]

While InsideLegal is a Big Data Innovation Summit media sponsor this year, a previous commitment has us relegated to spectating/participating from the virtual sidelines so be sure to check out our Twitter feed throughout the day, as well as the one dedicated to the event #BIGDBN and #BigData.