What’s a Data Scientist? Joshua Konkle, Vice President at DCIG, quoted (scroll down) a few definitions earlier this week: Continue reading
The First Law of Big Data
EMC released today the 5th annual Digital Universe study from IDC. So now we have five years’ worth of estimating, with a consistent methodology, the amount of data created and copied annually in the world. It turns out that the amount of digital data created each year has grown by a factor of 9 in the last five years. And since IDC uses the same methodology to forecast the next five years, it looks like data will grow by a factor of 61 over the ten-year period, 2005 t0 2015. Continue reading
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Crowdsourcing and Big Data
The Wikipedia article on Big Data says it “requires exceptional technologies to efficiently process large quantities of data within tolerable elapsed times.” The examples given (Hadoop, MapReduce, Cloud Computing, etc.) do not include one very exceptional technology, the human brain, and a new way to harness its power, “crowdsourcing.” In the 2006 Wired article in which he coined the term, Jeff Howe wrote: “Just as distributed computing projects like UC Berkeley’s SETI@home have tapped the unused processing power of millions of individual computers, so distributed labor networks are using the Internet to exploit the spare processing power of millions of human brains.” Isn’t crowdsourcing one of the “exceptional technologies” required by Big Data?
To find out more about crowdsourcing and its role in the service of Big Data, I attended yesterday a Crowdsortium Meetup. Karim Lakhani from the Harvard Business School opened with a brief keynote, reminding us of (Bill) Joy’s Law: “No matter where you are, most smart people work for someone else.” Following him was a panel with the aforementioned Howe, Dwayne Spradlin (CEO of Innocentive), Doron Reuveni (CEO of uTest), Dan Sullivan (CEO of Appswell), moderated expertly by Jim Savage, partner and co-founder of Longworth Venture Partners. Continue reading
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Big Data News Roundup
IBM’s Watson visited a few conferences last week. Watson’s lead developer, David Ferrucci delivered a keynote at the ACM’s 2011 Federated Computing Research Conference in San Jose, CA. Continue reading
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Hunch.com: Training the Web to be Your Friend
Would you like the Web to understand your inner GPS?
Then go to Hunch.com and start training the Web. After answering a few questions about your tastes, preferences, and opinions, you will get a set of recommendations from other Hunch members for movies, books, restaurants, recipes, music, vacation spots, shops, gadgets and other goodies. Hunch will also predict how well you’ll like each recommendation. The more you interact with the site (e.g., answering more questions, rating Hunch’s predictions, adding a descriptive tag, making a recommendation), the more accurate and relevant its recommendations become. Continue reading
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Big Data for Enterprise Decisions
James Taylor: “For all the focus on visualization and ad-hoc queries in Big Data systems, the end result is often going to be automation – a Decision Management system. Continue reading
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Data Scientists Wanted
“The United States alone faces a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with analytical expertise and 1.5 million managers and analysts with the skills to understand and make decisions based on the analysis of big data.” –McKinsey Continue reading
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All You Need is Optimized Data
“[Match.com’s vice-president of strategy Amarnath] Thombre says the technology that helps people fall in love isn’t so different from the kind that enables companies to whisk goods from warehouses to store shelves. ‘In both situations, you are trying to optimize data,’ he says with a shrug.”
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Big Data and the Future of Business: Don’t Automate, Analyze
Sometime ago I got an email from Netflix telling me that “recently you may have had trouble instantly watching TV episodes or movies due to technical issues.”As a matter of fact, I did not experience any “technical difficulties.” I simply started and stopped a number of stream-able movies. So I skipped Netflix’s offer of credit to my account but started thinking about the future of business in the era of Big Data. Continue reading
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