Dozens of guests attended the June 8 inaugural tech talk event hosted by the American Society of the Engineers of Indian Origin Southern California chapter in San Diego, Calif., which focused on big data as a talking point.

The event, held in partnership with Alliant University, featured corporate executives and experts from different fields, including several Indian American executives. Among the speakers at the event that focused on seeing and understanding big data, innovation and opportunities in data analytics included Liquid Grids president and chief executive Malcolm Bohm, who talked about finding the value of small data in the sea of big data, as well as how to tear apart the expected to find the unexpected in vast volumes of unstructured text.

Also speaking at the event were Accelerant Inc. managing partner Andy Sharma and U.C. San Diego computer science and biology department professor Robert Edwards.

The meeting began with Alliant University dean of CSML Dr. Rachna Kumar talking about the university courses in the area of data analytics and ASEI president Arun Rajaram talking about the society’s mission, including knowledge sharing among engineers and technologists, helping engineers become entrepreneurs and uniting the philanthropically-minded engineers to join as a team to help the underprivileged sections of our society.

Richa Nand, vice president of ASEI, introduced the speakers. Ashish Mehta, CEO of Patient Click, moderated the panel discussion.