"Big data" from technology circle to mainstream market

The combination of massive data and intelligent software algorithms provides the possibility for enterprises to capture new business opportunities. (TechWeb map)

Beijing Time August 12 News, according to foreign media reports, this year is a big data, the history of an important year, by the technology circle into the mainstream market.

Big data is an important theme at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where participants released the title "Big Data, Great impact" (big Impact). In March, the U.S. federal government unveiled a large data-calculation research program costing 200 million of dollars.

The New York Times has also used the term "big data" in the title of the article, such as "The Age of Great" (the era of large numbers). A sure sign of the popularity of large data is that last month, in the comic book "Dilbert", created by Adams Scott, the text of a comic book reads, "It's ubiquitous, omniscient" (it comes from everywhere. It knows all), and the next comic is, "This is the Big Data" (the its name is great).

There are two reasons for the success of the term "big data", one of which is that the terminology itself is not technically strong, and the second is that the term contains a series of progressive technologies that are "promising".

Large data is a sketch symbol, which means that artificial intelligence tools, such as machine learning, are used to process data in non-standard databases, including browsing habits, social network user information, sensor data, and monitoring data.

The combination of massive data and intelligent software algorithms provides the possibility for enterprises to capture new business opportunities. Google and Facebook, for example, are big data companies. IBM's Watson supercomputer triumphed over humans in the quiz show "Jeopardy" last year. In theory, large data can improve decision-making in business and medical processes, making decisions more reliant on data and analysis rather than intuition and experience.

Joen Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University, said, "The term" big data itself is vague, but in some ways very specific. " Large data is the label of a process that can transform everything. ”

Ever-growing data is a challenge. At the end of 19th century, census takers did not know how to count and classify the rapidly growing population of the United States. An innovative breakthrough in the 1890 census was a machine-handled punch card invented by Herman Holleris (Herman Hollerith), a technology that became the foundation of IBM.

Large data is a rhetorical word, and in terms of data, "big" is a fast-growing term. According to several computer scientists and industry executives, the term "big data" began to appear in technology circles in 2008. Wired published an article that is pertinent to the opportunities and challenges posed by the deluge of data. "Wired," said the big data is "the Petabyte era" of the beginning. This is a very good article, but "petabyte" technology is too strong, it is difficult to popular in the mainstream market. Humans will create more data--exabyte, Zettabyte and yottabyte than the Petabyte magnitude.

At first, many scientists and engineers derided "big data" as just a marketing term. At the end of 2008, "Big Data" was endorsed by some of the leading computer science researchers in the United States, and the industry organization "Computing Community Alliance" (Computing Community Consortium) published an influential white paper, Big Data calculation: in Business, The creation of a revolutionary breakthrough in the fields of science and society, the writer is a renowned computer scientist, Landaur Breint of Carnegie Mellon University (Randal E. Bryant), University of California, Berkeley Landy Caze (Randy H. Katz), Edward LAZOSGA of the University of Washington ( Edward D. Lazowska).

Their endorsement provides intellectual support for "big data" terminology. Rod A. Smith, IBM technical expert and vice president of emerging Internet technology, said he liked the term "big data" because it made people's minds not limited to data-processing machines, and "What really matters to big data is new uses and new insights, not the data itself", says Lode Smith.

IBM uses "Big Data" terminology in marketing, especially after communicating with customers. In 2008, Smith's team set up a website to explain the concept of "big Data", which has been greatly enriched. 2011, IBM introduced the Twitter tag-#IBMbigdata. IBM has also set up a large data mailing list, which was published in January this year in an ebook titled "Understanding Big Data" (understanding).

SAS Cato ("SAS"), founded in 1976, developed software that traverses databases and acquires valuable information. SAS has a number of terms in its business area, including data Mining (mining), business intelligence (business FDI), and data analytics.

Initially, the SAS chief marketing officer, Jim Davis, Davis that "big data" was just another marketing term in the industry, "I wasn't interested in it at first," noting that for decades, SAS's big corporate clients, such as banks and insurers, have been "digging up" massive amounts of data.

However, large data technologies can take advantage of all the Web data outside the enterprise database. As SAS technology can take advantage of the vast amounts of data in these Internet eras, its marketing has changed. Last year, SAS began using the term "big data", "Large Data Analysis" (Big Analytics). For years, SAS has been using the term "high-performance analysis" (High-performance Analytics). In May, SAS appointed Paul Kent, vice president for the Big data business, Kent. "We have to be ' parrot '," Davis said. ”

"Big Data" also has a negative meaning, because the words "great Brother", "large Oil", "da Government" are derogatory. Proponents of large data technology say the benefits of using "big data" terms outweigh the risks.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)