Big Data: More Than Just a Pretty Face

Buzzword alert: If you haven’t heard the phrase big data, you may have been living under a rock for quite some time. It’s everywhere. When people are talk about ‘working in the cloud’ and making ‘predictions about elections,’ they’re talking about using big data. Sounds impressive, right? Well… if you don’t know what the phrase actually means, you’re not alone. There’s a lot of definitions of big data, many of them correct, but the common threads between them all focus on the fact that within modern computing there are a lot of data points, and the points are too complicated to measure with traditional computing tools.

We (and that we means society at large here) are really good at generating big data. When was the last time you got a handwritten parking ticket? Instead, your license plate number, car make and model, and locations that you park are all in a database somewhere. If you’re like me, you regularly park in multiple jurisdictions. Virginia, Washington DC, and Maryland all have records of my car being parked there recently. If you get your weather forecasts from Weather Underground, you can access weather data from lots of locations for any day back to the 1880s. Crazy. So what do we do with all this?

Earlier this month, the British Embassy’s Science and Innovation team teamed up with Research Councils UK and the University of Maryland to bring together UK and US experts in data analytics for a two-day workshop. These are some of the people who work with that big data to try to figure out what it all means. We had computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and social scientists from academia, government, and industry. It was a great mix of people. We didn’t leave the room with any data challenges solved, but we fostered a lot of new links and created a lot of opportunity for the researchers present. Some highlights included:

• A panel with the Research Councils, US Department of Energy, and National Science Foundation talking about the opportunities and challenges funders face around big data, including what their agencies hope to fund in the next few years.
• A dinner at the Library of Congress keynoted by the US Census Bureau’s lead on big data, Cavan Capps.
•  A brainstorming session to end the workshop where our attendees generated a ridiculously impressive 14 ideas for future collaborations in data analytics.

So big data is everywhere and it’s affecting all our lives. But it’s far from a panacea. There are privacy concerns, ethical concerns, and concerns within the research community. One big one is over cleaning the data: some believe that this process, which eliminates incomplete or flawed data, negatively impacts the whole set and in some cases, renders it worthless. Will its benefits outweigh the risks?

Our workshop discussed how our US partners look at big data and how it can be used resourcefully and safely. The UK is just as supportive, and this is evident in the ‘Eight Great Technologies,’ championed by UK Science Minister David Willetts, which through R&D will deliver jobs and growth to the UK. Specifically, a 189m GBP investment announced last year in big data computing will build on the UK’s ability to analyze big data sets tremendously.

Big data is not going anywhere, but fortunately there are people working all over to globe to put it to good use.