Podcast
Helsinki Data Mafia - Podcast You Can’t Refuse
The Official Podcast of Helsinki Data Week! By data nerds, for data nerds, in Finland and abroad. Top-shelf guests & hot topics from the world of Data, Analytics, and AI. Presented by Juha Korpela, Eevamaija Virtanen, Säde Haveri,
and Antti Rask - the Helsinki Data Week Crew.
In this special episode, the entire Helsinki Data Week crew gets together to discuss the upcoming HDW2025 event. Take a peek behind the scenes and hear what it feels like to build an event like this, and how important communities and personal relationships are.
What have we learned? Where are we now? And what are we, as organizers, excited about when it comes to this year’s Helsinki Data Week? Listen and find out!
In this episode, Juha and Evamaija interview Pasi Jalonen, COO of ADE Insights Oy, the company behind Agile Data Engine and a main partner of HDW2025.
We discuss Pasi’s transition from consulting to product development, the precarious balance between agility and governance, and how data platforms should be reliable and trustworthy enough to just “be there” while your main focus is delivering business value.
In this episode of Helsinki Data Mafia, Säde Haveri is joined by Ole Olesen-Bagneux, the Chief Evangelist at Actian, a two-time O’Reilly Author and our Helsinki Data Week keynote speaker from 2024.
We explore both the creative process and the novel ideals in Ole’s latest O’Reilly book, “Fundamentals of Metadata Management”. We also get a sneak peek into what might be in the “books” for both Ole and the metadata management landscape.
In this episode of Helsinki Data Mafia, hosts Juha Korpela and Eeva-Maija Virtanen discuss with Keith Belanger, Field CTO at Dataops.Live and a Snowflake Superhero, about the evolving landscape of data modeling, semantic layers, and the impact of AI on data practices.
They discuss the importance of understanding business concepts, the challenges of data integration, and the need for cohesive data strategies.
While our technology keeps advancing, there are some things that never go out of fashion - and konwing what your data really means is increasingly important in the age of AI.
Luke Roquet, co-founder of Datavolo and now VP of Industry Strategy & Solution Sales at Snowflake, joins hosts Juha and Eevamaija.
They talk about their career path from engineering to sales, marketing, and startups, and how Snowflake’s acquisition of Datavolo expanded its capabilities for unstructured and multimodal data.
The discussion covers the scale of unstructured data in enterprises, challenges in healthcare data quality, cultural differences between Europe and North America on data, the role of semantic layers in AI, and Snowflake’s focus on open standards and interoperability.
Jessica Talisman, the world’s most famous librarian, joins Eevamaija Virtanen and Säde Haveri to unpack what most data teams overlook: the foundational role of library science in data engineering and AI.
From metadata governance to ontologies, tacit knowledge, and institutional memory, they show how structured thinking shapes everything from information retrieval to LLM behavior.
We talk about what it means to build knowledge systems that actually work, and why ignoring classification and power dynamics will break your AI stack.
One of the most important conversations we’ve had on what AI needs but rarely gets: structure, context, and memory.
Juha and John Giles discuss the power of business-focused data modeling and how a good-enough high-level understanding of core entities and relationships - a “Data Town Plan” - can be a powerful tool to build trust, shared understanding, and business value in any organization. Even better, such a model can be built quickly and easily by utilizing common patterns.
If you find John’s thoughts interesting, check out his recently published book “The Data Elephant in the Board Room”!
In this episode of Helsinki Data Mafia, Juha and Säde interview Tommi Vihervaara and Markku Mäenpää, renowned Finnish data experts and hosts of their own podcast, Datapääoma. We discuss the concept of 'shifting left' in data management, emphasizing the importance of treating data quality as a priority from the outset. Challenges of data quality management, the role of data contracts and standards, and the significance of communication between data producers and consumers are all key topics in the discussion. How far left we should actually shift with these, and where does "data work" actually start?
In this episode, Aya Matsuyama, former aerospace engineer turned environmental philosopher, joins Eevamaija Virtanen to talk about what Japanese cultural wisdom teaches about failure, vulnerability and collective survival.
Aya started by building planes and nuclear robots and ended up running world simulations where people destroy the world to learn why they do it.
We explore how gamification forces people to slow down, face their blind spots and ask: Where are we going, and why?
In this episode, Katariina Kari, the Head of Data at In Parallel and former Lead Ontologist at IKEA, is interviewed by our Säde Haveri and Eevamaija Virtanen. The topic is Knowledge Graphs: what are they, how do they enable organizations to enhance their AI solutions, and how did Katariina actually end up working with them? Real-world use cases, value-creation, corporate memory - you don't want to miss this!
In this episode of Helsinki Data Mafia, Juha interviews Tiankai Feng, a data leader and author whose new book Humanizing Data Strategy came out recently. With Tiankai and Juha both also being musicians, the discussion takes an interesting and unique angle to the issues of data governance and strategy: how does all this stuff compare to playing in a band, and what could we learn from the world of music? Even if you're not a musician yourself, you will likely find some very fresh viewpoints here!
In this wide-ranging discussion (recorded live in Helsinki!) Juha and Säde talk with Alec Sharp, a world-renowned modeler of both data and business processes. Alec literally wrote the book on process modeling, and has practiced and taught classes on data modeling for decades. But is it really "data" modeling, when we're simply talking about "things" that exist in the actual business? And why are empathy and simplicity so important? And how do you know a $3B project is not going to work out? Listen to this episode of Helsinki Data Mafia to find out!
In this episode, Juha chats with Karin Håkansson, a Data Mesh Learning MVP, speaker, and Head of Data at Adapteo Group. The topic is Data Mesh - the federated, domain-driven, and product-oriented framework everyone's been talking about for the last few years. What is it really about, what is the role of data products in it, and what does it take to succeed with the Mesh?
Welcome to Helsinki Data Mafia! In this very first episode of the podcast, the Helsinki Data Week crew explain what this whole thing is about and why they are launching a podcast - and what exciting things lie ahead for the podcast & for Helsinki Data Week 2025!