What's New - 2015

 

BDAIDSHow Big Data is Helping Fight AIDS in Africa

HIV transmission from mother to child is a major, and preventable, factor in the ongoing prevalence of AIDS in Africa. While transmission rates are below 5% with effective prenatal treatment, the World Health Organization says they can range up to 45% without treatment—unfortunately, a common situation in the developing world.

Postnatal testing, then, is often vital in spotting infections in newborns, and treating them. But even as testing has become more accessible in Africa, it has remained slow, with devastating results—untreated infant HIV is usually fatal within a year. The problem isn’t just the time needed for the actual tests, but also the unpredictable ways that samples traveled from clinics to labs.

Read more at Fortune.

 


BDMedicalDecisions

Using Big Data to Make Wiser Medical Decisions

As the chief information officer of a large academic medical center, I oversee four petabytes of data. Is that “big data”? I have little difficulty storing, securing, and accessing it, so I’m not sure it qualifies as big. To me, the bigness of data is not its absolute size, but the task of transforming it into wisdom.

At Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), we use big data to create real-world applications that lead to wise clinical decisions for patients. That’s something any forward-thinking provider must aim for in today’s data-driven health care environment. I’d like to discuss three BIDMC big-data applications that required both technical expertise and leadership — and that have helped our patients, including my family and me.

Read more at HBR.

 


CloudAppliances

Cloud and appliances set to boost big data adoption, Hadoop in 2016

A new report from Ovum predicts cloud and appliances are set to boost the “next wave” of big data adoption and target “more of the enterprise mainstream that will have more modest IT and data science skills compared with the early adopters.”

In its report, “2016 trends to watch: big data,” Ovum forecasts increased IT spending will lift investment in big data analytics; appliance and cloud will drive Hadoop adoption to mainstream enterprises; and SQL will remain the go to for big data analytics, though Spark is expected to show robust growth.

Read more at RCR Wireless.

 


IBM Datapalooza, Oracle Updates BI Platform: Big Data Roundup

Big data is expected to make a big impact in healthcare and personalized medicine. But where are the real projects in this field and what progress is being made?

This week, InformationWeek took a deeper look at big data projects for personalized medicine. Plus, we have news on Google open sourcing its machine learning library, TensorFlow. And we've also got news from Informatica, IBM, Oracle, and more.

Read more at Information Week.

 


Text Analytics Gurus Debunk Four Big Data Myths

Could text analytics be the unsung hero of big data?

Text analytics mines reams of often ephemeral, unstructured data — from a voice recording of a customer call to emails or a Tweet  — for meaningful insights that can inform business decisions, be it a branding strategy or a product launch.

And while retailers have hailed big data as the key to everything from delivering shoppers personalized merchandise offers to real-time metrics on product performance, the industry is mostly scratching its head on how to monetize all the data that’s being generated in the digital era.

Read more at Forbes.

 


New IDC Forecast Sees Worldwide Big Data Technology and Services Market Growing to $48.6 Billion in 2019, Driven by Wide Adoption Across Industries

The Big Data market continues to exhibit strong momentum as businesses accelerate their transformation into data-driven companies. This momentum is driving strong growth in big data-related infrastructure, software, and services. A new forecast from International Data Corporation (IDC) sees the big data technology and services market growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23.1% over the 2014-2019 forecast period with annual spending reaching $48.6 billion in 2019. And a new IDC Special Study examines spending on big data solutions in greater detail across 19 vertical industries and eight big data technologies.

Read more at Business Wire.

 


Big Data: 20 Mind-Boggling Facts Everyone Must Read

Big data is not a fad. We are just at the beginning of a revolution that will touch every business and every life on this planet.

But loads of people are still treating the concept of big data as something they can choose to ignore — when actually, they’re about to be run over by the steamroller that is big data.

Read more at Forbes.

 


MSFTVolometrixMicrosoft Acquires VoloMetrix To Apply Big Data to Worker Productivity

Organizations across industries are constantly seeking ways to make their workers more efficient and productive, but it’s often hard for them to access the type of information about the day-to-day doings of their employees to make this happen.

Enter the emerging organizational analytics field to help solve this dilemma. This type of technology analyzes employee e-mail, meeting schedules and other work data to create relationships and opportunities for worker collaboration for more efficiency. Now it has a chance to go more mainstream with Microsoft’s recent purchase of one of the pioneers in the field — Seattle-based startup VoloMetrix.

Read more at Design News. 

 


AzureMicrosoft expands Azure Data Lake with new big data tools

Microsoft had its sights set squarely on big data when it introduced its Azure Data Lake earlier this year, and on Monday it broadened that effort with new tools designed to make big data processing and analytics simpler and more accessible.

First, what Microsoft originally called Azure Data Lake has now been renamed Azure Data Lake Store, offering a single repository for data of any size and type -- including unstructured, semi-structured and structured -- without requiring application changes as data scales.

Read more at CIO.

 

 


DataScienceYoutube

DJ Patil's message to JSM attendees

A special message from U.S. Chief Data Scientist DJ Patil to 2015 JSM attendees.

See the video on YouTube.

 

 

 

 

 


startupsThe Importance of Design Thinking for Big Data Startups

We've reached a point technologically where consumers are no longer impressed by access to data, as data availability, even our own, is increasingly the norm. Instead, the usability of that data is what's driving demand for new products and services. Even the term "Big Data" is slowly being replaced by "Business Intelligence" as data is increasingly becoming commoditized.

This is where Design Thinking becomes so powerful. What insights can we extract and how do we present those insights to the user? The difficulty with that question is that it requires restraint and focus.

Read more at TechCrunch.

 

 


BDUnicornBig Data Goes Unicorn Hunting

In today's big data era, the U.S. is starving for data scientists, according to panelists at Dell World here. There are plenty of opportunities in data analytics, they said; the big challenge is in finding people who can pluck useful insights from the mountains of information.

"Actually finding people who can extract insight, wisdom maybe, from increasingly diverse real-time sorts of data is truly the bottleneck," Michael Chui, partner at research firm McKinsey Global Institute, said during a panel discussion. "The set of skills partly around statistics, partly around machine learning, around visualization, around being able to design experiments... These are the scarce resources."

Read more at EE Times.

 

 


AppEc

Nine out of ten cos see benefit from Big Data in today's application economy

The results of a global study commissioned by CA Technologies has revealed Enterprise Big Data strategies are delivering key benefits to organizations despite noted challenges in implementation. Most notably, nine in 10 organizations are experiencing or anticipate seeing, more effective targeted marketing and selling campaigns. Additionally, 88 percent see or anticipate increased revenue. These benefits are impressive despite 92 percent of respondents citing obstacles to their Big Data projects.

Read more at First Post.

 

 

 


GoodEvil

Is big data analytics good or evil?

Data doesn’t spy on people, people spy on people. But, often that simple fact is hard to grasp. Given the NSA scandal, regular data breaches and even stories of TVs spying on private conversations, it is not surprising that the public is becoming more distrustful of data practices. Among Americans, 91 percent agree that consumers have lost control over how personal information is collected and used by companies, and 61 percent want to do more to protect their data online. Whether data is knowingly disclosed through social media, or unknowingly collected through digital footprints on websites and smartphones, there is trepidation that privacy, freedom of information, and even democracy are at stake.

With all the lawsuits working through the courts and all the scary possibilities being discussed in the media, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that big data analytics is inherently evil. So is it?

Read more at Venture Beat.

 

 


TechTarget Hired Veteran Wall Street Data Scientist Chuck Alvarez as its New Chief Data Officer

Leading technology media company TechTarget, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTGT) today announced that it has hired Chuck Alvarez, 28-year veteran of Wall Street and pioneer in distributed computing and analytics, as Chief Data Officer. In his new role, Alvarez will focus on TechTargets Big Data strategy and new initiatives that will leverage TechTargets Deal DataTM to deliver rich demand-side research, analytics and insight to enterprise Information Technology (IT) professionals, IT vendors and institutional investors.

Millions of IT buyers come to TechTargets global network of more than 120 sites monthly to research and evaluate technology related to active projects. By analyzing the activity of buyers and sellers across our network, TechTarget (TTGT) accesses pre-deal data on approximately 60,000 enterprise IT deals annually and additionally generates more than 13,000 IT buyer survey responses monthly. The Companys newly-formed IT Deal AlertTM Research services will also collect and analyze post-deal data to provide the markets with a truly closed-loop view of enterprise IT buying.

Read more at Seeking Alpha.

 

 


GoogleMaps

Google Maps now shows real-time public transit info in San Francisco, Chicago, UK, and more

The public transportation info found in Google Maps is about to display real-time for San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, Budapest, Netherlands and the UK.

Google Maps will show you info like whether a bus is running late, or a train is ahead of schedule. To accomplish this, Google has partnered with over 6,000 transit authorities to get a current view of where their vehicles are.

Read more at The Next Web.

 

 

 


Data-center-concept-image

Manufacturing Plants as Centers of Data in the IIoT

Manufacturing plants are on the cusp of producing much more data than they do today. One motivation for the increase in data being gathered for analysis is predictive maintenance actions. The fact that plentiful data can be collected, analyzed, and used to create knowledge that leads to the prevention of downtime is too compelling to ignore. When you compare the cost of a production outage due to machine failure versus the cost of collecting and analyzing the data, the argument makes itself.

Read more at Design News.

 

 

 

 


Unstructured Big Data is a Big Manufacturing Challenge

Big Data includes tons of unstructured content, from PDFs to video files. Manufacturers now have to pay more attention to the unstructured content in order to get their arms about Big Data. While much of the Big Data, such as database files, is structured, one of the biggest challenges is managing the unstructured content.

Greg Milliken, VP of Marketing at M-Files, notes that the amount of unstructured data manufacturers have to manage is growing exponentially and is becoming a major challenge. “When we talk about unstructured files of content, we refer to documents such as spreadsheets, Word files, video, or CAD. Usually we manage these files in folders or shared drives in Windows,” he told us. “The structured data resides in ERP or accounting, where it’s organized in tables. Yet unstructured files contain a huge amount of data that is necessary to run a manufacturing business.”

Read more at Design News.

 

 


NielsenAlibaba

Nielsen and Alibaba Launch Game-Changing Big Data Management Platform

This week in Shanghai, Nielsen and Alibaba Group held a joint event as Nielsen launched its cutting-edge innovation solution, New Offer Advisor. By leveraging Alibaba’s e-commerce big data processing ability and Nielsen’s world-class data analysis capability, this innovative product is aimed at helping clients drive innovation with a deep understanding of the crowded and highly-competitive Chinese e-commerce market.

Approximately 300 attendees from major manufacturers and e-commerce players and 30 journalists from China and around the world were given an in-depth introduction to the break-through capabilities powered by the Nielsen and Alibaba’s partnership.

Read more at Nielsen.com.

 

 


IBM, Deloitte bring big data to risk management

IBM and Deloitte are betting that computers can understand reams of financial regulatory guidelines more thoroughly, and speedily, than humans.

The two companies have developed a system that can parse complex government regulations related to financial matters, and compare them to a company's own plans for meeting those requirements.

The work is part of an ongoing partnership between the two companies to help financial firms and other organizations use advanced data analysis techniques to improve their practices around risk management.

Read more at IT World.

 

 


CMUHealthDataThe Future of Health Care is in the Data

A new alliance is uniting Carnegie Mellon University's unrivaled machine learning capabilities with the University of Pittsburgh's world-class health sciences expertise.

Funded by UPMC, the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance with CMU and Pitt promises to transform the explosion of health-related "big data" — from sources as varied as electronic medical records, genomic sequencing, insurance records and wearable sensors — into new technologies, products and services that will change the way diseases are prevented and patients diagnosed, treated and engaged in their own care.

Read more at Carnegie Mellon University.

 

 


whitehousedatachiefU.S. Data Chief Aims to Empower Citizens with Information

A few years ago, almost no one outside Silicon Valley had heard the term data scientist. Now it is one of the country’s most in-demand job titles. Even the White House recently hired one: DJ Patil.

Mr. Patil, 40 years old, is credited with popularizing the position, loosely defined as a technician who searches for meaningful patterns in large data sets. His data science team at LinkedIn Corp.—the first of its kind—built the “People You May Know” button that helped launch the social platform by nudging users to link to their professional contacts.

Read more at The Wall Street Journal.

 

 


UScapitolSenate Democrats Reintroduce Bill to Curb Data Brokers

Four Senate Democrats have re-introduced a bill that would enable consumers to wield control over how information about them is used by data brokers.

The Data Broker Accountability and Transparency Act (S. 668) empowers consumers to stop the use and sale of their personal information by data brokers. The measure also allows consumers to correct information held by data brokers, which the bill defines as companies that collect personal information in order to sell it to third parties.

Read more at MediaPost.

 

 


White House Names First US Chief Data Scientist

The White House has appointed Dr DJ Patil as the first US Chief Data Scientist, to help 'maximize the nation's return on its investment in data'.

Dr DJ Patil (pictured) joins President Obama's administration after serving as VP of Product at big data start-up RelateIQ. Prior to this he worked for venture capital firm Greylock as Data Scientist in Residence; he was Head of Data Products and Chief Scientist at LinkedIn; and he held senior roles at Skype, PayPal and eBay, and earlier at the Department of Defence.

Read more at MrWeb.

 

 

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