by Angela Guess
Steve Lohr of the New York Times recently explored how Big Data has become so, well, Big. He writes, “THIS has been the crossover year for Big Data — as a concept, as a term and, yes, as a marketing tool. Big Data has sprung from the confines of technology circles into the mainstream… The Big Data story is the making of a meme. And two vital ingredients seem to be at work here. The first is that the term itself is not too technical, yet is catchy and vaguely evocative. The second is that behind the term is an evolving set of technologies with great promise, and some pitfalls. Big Data is a shorthand label that typically means applying the tools of artificial intelligence, like machine learning, to vast new troves of data beyond that captured in standard databases. The new data sources include Web-browsing data trails, social network communications, sensor data and surveillance data.”
He goes on, “The combination of the data deluge and clever software algorithms opens the door to new business opportunities. Google and Facebook, for example, are Big Data companies. The Watson computer from I.B.M. that beat human ‘Jeopardy’ champions last year was a triumph of Big Data computing. In theory, Big Data could improve decision-making in fields from business to medicine, allowing decisions to be based increasingly on data and analysis rather than intuition and experience. ‘The term itself is vague, but it is getting at something that is real,’ says Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University. ‘Big Data is a tagline for a process that has the potential to transform everything’.”
