Big data and its Big Potential
I must say whenever I heard about big data, the first thing that comes to my mind is marketing and dealing with potential clients. And, trust me there are many people like me. In last couple of years, the hype that big data has got pushed me to learn more about it. First thing, big data is not only about collecting data, in petabytes, to improve marketing strategies. This technique can be used on large scale to solve real world problems… Be it dealing with crimes, predicting deteriorating climatic conditions, education or health care. Now almost, every sector is using this technique to make humans work efficiently.
At present, different agencies have huge sets of data from different sectors, there is no doubt about it. But one big challenge that is coming across is utilizing this data in right manner. Data scientist are working hard day and night to make this data useful to increase the efficiency.
Big data is most effective when it is aimed at improving people’s ability to do their jobs, says Mark Cleverley, Global Director of Public Safety at IBM.
One of the best uses of big data has been done by Memphis. The police here used Blue Crush system with the help of IBM. This helped in reducing crime rate to 30%. There was later a controversy when the funding of the system was cut.
In another example, California Independent System operator that manages electricity supply uses big data in innovative way. It incorporate space-time insight software to utilize huge amount of data. This data is used to create visual display that prompts the users to balance power supply, using renewable sources of energy, etc.
We all know that there is huge hype about big data. On the contrary, experts believed that to get best result, we must utilize this technique invisibly. The more noise we make about its usage the less precision we get in results.
At this point of time, the technology world is dealing a big crisis in creating good data scientist… because it is very important to interpret the huge amount of data in productive manner. Last year ‘The Forbes’ published an articles saying that this is one of the sexiest job of 21st century. Indeed, due to huge scarcity of data scientist and training infrastructure, the potential scientists are getting what they demand. In fact the salaries, bonus and increments are huge for them, due to which an instability can be seen in the tenure… rate of job change is quite high.
Second thing, dealing with huge sets of data is highly expensive. It usually deals with data in petabytes and this can be imagined very well what sort of infrastructure is required.
