Lei Tang's List: Big Data

• The deadline for full proposals is June 13, 2012, for mid-scale projects and July 11, 2012, for small projects.

• Simply put, big data is now a fixture on the battlefield and across the global security landscape. But similar to health care professionals managing large volumes of patient data, processing the massive amount of military intelligence and information can be like drinking from a fire hose, both for soldiers out in the field and for defense professionals operating in command centers.
• There is no shortage of data. There is a dearth of analysis

• the value of the transaction isn’t in the fees, it’s in the data that is generated

  • good point
• Often people won’t know exactly what hidden pattern they are looking for, or what the value they extract may be, and therefore it will be impossible to know how much to invest in the technology.

• as well as software and sensors that monitor shipments, suppliers and customers — to guide decisions, trim costs and lift sales.
• projected that the United States needs 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired.
• the discipline is becoming increasingly data-intensive

• At the World Economic Forum last month in Davos, Switzerland, Big Data was a marquee topic. A report by the forum, “Big Data, Big Impact,” declared data a new class of economic asset, like currency or gold.
• Big Data has the potential to be “humanity’s dashboard,”
• There is a lot more data, all the time, growing at 50 percent a year, or more than doubling every two years, estimates IDC,
• The wealth of new data, in turn, accelerates advances in computing
• Data measurement, Professor Brynjolfsson explains, is the modern equivalent of the microscope.
• decisions will increasingly be based on data and analysis rather than on experience and intuition.
• They studied 179 large companies and found that those adopting “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity gains that were 5 percent to 6 percent higher than other factors could explain.
• In economic forecasting, research has shown that trends in increasing or decreasing volumes of housing-related search queries in Google are a more accurate predictor of house sales in the next quarter than the forecasts of real estate economists.
• With huge data sets and fine-grained measurement, statisticians and computer scientists note, there is increased risk of “false discoveries.
• These models, like metaphors in literature, are explanatory simplifications.

11 more annotations...