Smarter cities are now building citizen-centered social programs backed by big data analytics. They’re using this technology to improve social welfare and alleviate socioeconomic distress. In a recent IBM report, Dr. Jonathan Fielding, now retired Director and Health Officer of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health said, “An innovative strategy that introduces improvedRead… Read more »
“It comes from everywhere. It knows all. … [It] lives in the cloud. It knows what we do.” That’s how big data is described in a “Dilbert” comic strip. While that might sound funny, it’s true that while everyone talks about big data, many people don’t know what it is or does. But it’s actuallyRead… Read more »
Last month at the Federal Forum in Washington, D.C., I joined Brocade’s industry partners and the government’s leading IT decision makers to discuss how new, exciting technologies are changing the way our government serves the American citizenry, enables warfighters and meets the demands of a growing list of stakeholders. We heard from an impressive groupRead… Read more »
Moving people analytics beyond dashboards to an interactive exchange and collaboration of data and information helps the entire organization evolve and, finally, truly embrace analytics.
A national conversation is continuing to brew over whether Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) skills should be emphasized in schools and universities over humanities and liberal arts education. Several recent studies have found that the perceived higher marketplace value of STEM skills has led to a drop in the percentage of students pursuing humanitiesRead… Read more »
Database guru and 2014 Turing Award winner Dr. Michael Stonebraker is not a big fan of MapReduce. Or so we can readily surmise, based on some of the comments he made (together with co-author David DeWitt, another highly acclaimed database researcher) in a blog post in early 2008. He and DeWitt called Mapreduce a “giantRead… Read more »
This past March, the Association for Computing Machinery announced that its 2014 Turing Award would go to Dr. Michael Stonebraker. As a Google V.P. put it (Google puts up the $1M cash prize that goes with the award), “The efficient and effective management of Big Data is crucial to our 21st century global economy …Read… Read more »
Contrary to popular belief, governments have suffered from excess data- not a lack thereof. Before IT, as we know it today, revenue agencies used to rely solely on paper to store data files, most of it never to be used again. While we have come a long way from paper dependency, we still have muchRead… Read more »
People are much more likely to retain information – and become intrigued by it, by listening to an interesting story than by listening to recitation of points on a slide. We’re more likely to retain information, learn from it and be able to act on it if it contains up-to-the-minute data. And we’re more likely… Read more »
One of the many challenges involved in architecting “Big Data” solutions is in just moving the stuff around. Sometimes it makes sense to move the work to the Data (instead of the other way around). This assumes that your Data is already in a form that is amenable to heavy-duty analytics. More typically, you’re lookingRead… Read more »