The numbers have been collected and data crunched for Basis Tech Week, and we can officially say that each conference was a success! Overall, attendance was up 32% from 2012 to 2013 for all three conferences…and that was with a government furlough occurring in the not-too-distant past. Basis Tech Week also went international this year with attendees flying to Chantilly from 13 countries. In case you missed any of the events, slides are now available online [scroll to the bottom] with videos coming soon. So let’s break it down by conference, shall we?

Open Source Digital Forensics

Holy smokes! If someone wanted an indicator of how vibrant the open source digital forensic community is today, the Open Source Digital Forensics conference (now in its 4th year) would be a good place to start. In just one year, OSDF jumped from 204 registrants in 2012 to 416 registered this year, requiring us to move into a bigger ballroom. This year also marked the beginning of Autopsy training classes and a number of new OSDF-related tutorials. A few other highlights include Willi Ballenthin winning first place in the Autopsy plugin contest, and Petter Christian Bjelland generously donating his second place winnings to the Red Cross relief effort in the Philippines. You can download both modules here.

Open Source Search

Open source search is becoming a hot topic today with more and more companies realizing the importance of accurate search in their applications. Government agencies are also realizing the power of open source innovation — illustrated nicely in a recent open source report by GovLoop. As for OSS 2013 itself, we had a number of amazing talks from innovators in the field as well as interesting discussions led by chairwoman Sue Feldman. We also heard the latest developments of IBM’s Watson in the healthcare realm by keynote Eric Brown.

Human Language Technology

Today’s advanced search queries require text analytics algorithms smart enough to handle what people want to find. Basis Technology’s own David Murgatroyd, Gregor Stewart, and Brian Carrier laid the groundwork for how natural language processing, search, and digital forensics can be tied together in revealing various types of information. An example of this is the new release of Highlight, which was highlighted upon (bad pun intended) in a talk by Nicholas Bemish and Jennifer Flather. Our keynote speakers, Skip McCormick and Doug Naquin, made it clear that Big Data in government has huge potential and requires smart minds to make it all come together. Lastly, Luminoso CEO, Catherine Havasi, and Graham Katz of CACI gave two highly popular talks delving into the future of human language technology with topics such as content-based sentiment analysis and detection of significant societal events using social media outlets like Twitter.

Download the OSDF Slides

Download the OSS Slides

Download the HLT Slides

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