Big Data Is a Big Deal
We have been collecting, combining and analyzing data for decades now and slowly as technology is advancing, big data analytics is becoming more and more useful.
Big data analytics plays a big role in my life personally and continues to make it better everyday. I had been dealing with chronic foot pain since 11 years of age and the doctors gave up on medicine and had told me I have to figure out how to manage it on my own. After 6 years of struggling with it as it continued to hinder my normal activity in everyday life, I came upon an article on big data and decided to record my activities and measure the pain every hour on a scale of 1-10. I started filling out spreadsheets with details of how much I walked, where I am, what activity I’m doing and every little thing I could put down to make it as comprehensive as possible. Slowly it grew and soon I had 5-7 months of huge data scattered with the tiniest details.
On analyzing it further, I realized factors having direct correlation to the pain that I couldn’t have possibly imagined. Factors like the weather and temperature, amount of mental stress, amount of walk, sleep, and many others contributed to varying numbers on the pain scale. Since then I have built my life around all these factors and it has and helped me manage my pain greatly. Big data analytics has made my life much better, easier and if this little experiment could help me, it has the potential to help millions of people around the globe in all aspects of life.
Today, all industries from healthcare, travel, retail, to startups and the government are using big data tools to make their businesses tick. The biggest players in big data technology are :
Data management : To get reliable, high quality data.
Data mining : Data mining technology helps you examine large amounts of data to discover patterns in the data, and this information can be used for further analysis to help answer complex business questions.
Hadoop. Open source network to store large amounts of data
In-memory analytics. Analyzes data from system memory instead of hard disk for increased speed and efficiency.
Predictive analytics. Predictive analytics technology uses data, algorithms and machine learning to identify the likelihood of future outcomes based on previous data.
Text mining. This software allows you to analyze text data from the web, comment fields, books and other text-based sources to uncover insights you hadn’t noticed before. It uses machine learning or natural language processing technology to comb through documents emails, blogs.
Challenges that organizations face in adopting analytics :
According to Murli Buluswar, chief science officer, AIG, one of the biggest challenges is to change the mindset of the whole organization to start efficiently adopting such technologie. It has to change from a knowing culture to a learning culture, because as these new tools emerge, the companies need to be open and accepting to learn and grow them to use it to their benefits. Another challenge is finding all the right tools to cohesively generate value. According to Ruben Sigala, chief analytics officer, Caesars Entertainment, the individual systems work well, but all the software as an integrated system is still to flourish. Some of the other problems include security issues with big data and the hassle that comes with storing and handling such big volumes of information
What makes big data so useful is that it provides answers to questions that companies don’t even know exist until they look at the facts and analyze the patterns of information. It allows them to eliminate problem areas before any major damage to profits or reputation happens. We are moving towards a world where big data analytics is going to be used in every aspect of life from it is ordering food in a restaurant to networking, social media, upcoming tech and much more. It is revolutionizing the way objects interact and technologies work, and aims toward a smarter future.
References :
https://intellipaat.com/blog/7-big-data-examples-application-of-big-data-in-real-life/
https://kpilibrary.com/topics/10-awesome-ways-big-data-is-used-today-to-change-our-world
http://www.cio.com/article/3018429/big-data/10-top-big-data-and-analytics-stories-of-2015.html
http://www.dataversity.net/the-importance-of-big-data-and-data-visualization/
https://www.sas.com/en_us/insights/analytics/big-data-analytics.html
One comment on “Big Data Is a Big Deal”
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Hi Arohi and thanks for this post, it’s nice to hear how big data helped you with your foot.
There is no doubt that big data is a big deal and organizations definitely have to adjust to it as quickly as possible. Considering your background, I was wondering if you have a preference on a programming language for working with big data. You can find a few interesting articles on that matter like this one [http://www.infoworld.com/article/3049672/application-development/which-freaking-big-data-programming-language-should-i-use.html] but most of them are kind of out of date. Do you know what languages are most popular now a days and which ones look promising?