Tuesday, February 18, 2014

"Big Data Fuzz Buzz"

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Currently, there is a lot of excitement about Big Data and how it can change industrial landscapes. This might just be the new big thing to ignite an "information revolution" and improve quality of life for millions of people. It is very difficult to navigate and try to comprehend the whole Big Data idea and how it can be useful to an experienced data scientist, not to mention an excited beginner about the idea of solving major problems and improving living conditions, discovering new therapies, better healthcare delivery, financial analysis, marketing analytics, politics (of course) and the list goes on. Major multinational companies are utilizing Big Data as a key tool for decision making process. There are also huge database facilities storing incredible amount of data from scientific from hundreds of years of research work. Information technologist, software and hardware engineers have done a great job at bringing all this information to the forefront of research and make it accessible at a great extend.

With rise in Big Data buzz, science students are gearing their careers toward a more IT and data interpretation and application focus and how to implement the ever changing computing would into their careers and developmental skills. There are still great leaps to make but the strides that have been made so far has got the attention of leading scientist, C position leaders of big pharma and biotech companies during the decision making process to drive the companies objectives and goals. Personalized medicine would certainly be driven by personal data analytics and with an aggregation of millions of data from individuals who knows what might lie beneath?

There are some scientific techniques emerging that would have quite an impact on healthcare and how medicine is being applied. Directed evolution and next generation sequencing. Illumina annouced a $1000 dollar solution to decode the human genome in one year; a drastic overhaul of the previous methods used which took way too much time (decades) and hundreds of millions of dollars to complete the project. This is really exciting news for scientist who are very engage in this sector of the research, it would now be able to have information in a much faster way to continue a research project, apply for funding, which might have being otherwise not be as easy, cheap and rapid.


No!!,  I'm just kidding...Courtesy Of KDnuggets
Though this is relatively new in countries with well advanced and very sophisticated computer systems, a thorough understanding of the science and practicability of it is still been revealed,  it is still practical for emerging and developing markets to dive into Big Data before its too late being left behind, and instead of being at the core of the discussion they would be spending time doing catchup and yet borrowing intellectual property while maybe still in debt of previous ones. At least they would not be left behind by a huge gap and can close the gap between research in those parts of the world that are technologically handicap with countries of astonishing technological advancement. Most of them have the capacity to handle and store huge amounts of data and make it available for scientist doing research at local institutions and research centers and universities. Companies utilizing Big Data for research and decision making purposes would be attracting a lot of attention and from investors and even from end users.