Big Data: Advancing the Art of Analytics

This panel of top industry and government experts discusses what can be accomplished when massive data and cloud computing efficiencies combine to make advanced analysis and innovation possible.

Expert Reactions: Dave Mattox, Senior Associate
I see computers becoming "analysts" in the areas where the data is overwhelming in terms of both volume and heterogeneity. This is the area where a human cannot possibly hope to manage. Work is already being done in the scientific community that reverses the traditional process. Rather than develop a theory and then analyze the data to see if it fits, the data is used to generate possible theories.

Expert Reactions: Josh Sullivan, Senior Associate
Jeff is beginning to talk about the science of big data and the value to organizations of connecting information across the stove-pipes information systems.  Think of big data as the words of a story – by themselves they have limited meaning. When you add grammar and structure, you begin to link together these words and can develop many different meaning and insights from the collection of words.  The science of big data is similar----data stored in information systems are the words and the emerging data analytics is the grammar which allows analysts and decision makers to derive meaning from data.

Expert Reactions: Mike Cameron, Principal
Adding on to Mike’s point, users are less interested in the data than in answers to specific questions. So, unless you are a data scientist and find the data itself interesting, there is a step missing.  We need a set of data mining services to determine what entities are represented in the data, and the relationships between those entities.  I believe we need another layer of services on top of the data mining to move us from content to context.