One of the most interesting conferences that I attended in 2014 was hosted by the Sloan School at MIT October 10-11, which looked at a wide range of technical and non-technical issues around the use of very large scale digital platforms (social media, sales, etc) to support experiments both for busines optimization and for other research purposes. This has become an extremely sophisticated area in ways that do not seem to be  widely known.

The basic conference announcement, program and related information is here:

http://codecon.net/

Finally, just before Christmas, video of the event became available and can be found here:

http://mitsloan.mit.edu/ide/code/

I reccomend the plenary sessions and the "Fireside Panel" on Experimentation and Ethical Practice, which I found to be quite interesting. The parallel sessions are more variable, and many of the papers there are quite specialized.

Happy viewing, and best wishes for the new year.

Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI