Data driven has become a new wave of technology development

Beijing Time September 9 News, according to foreign media reports, in recent years, the technical storm began to scrape into the consumer market, influence once stronger than once. By remembering the personal computers of the 80 's, the Internet of the 90, and the development of smartphones in the last 5 years, you can feel how the power of technology affects our lives deeply.

Another technology development trend is that computing power is becoming more and more powerful. Many researchers and entrepreneurs believe that more intelligent devices and software will be able to accomplish more tasks based on automation, helping to make more rational business, scientific and government decisions. Moreover, the related hardware and software technology barriers have been broken, the development potential of unlimited, many people are optimistic about this.

Michael Blake (Michael R. Stonebraker) is one of the optimists. As a pioneer in database research, Yukin Wang Eugene Wong, a colleague at UC Berkeley in the late 70, and a team of scientists from IBM started developing their relational database systems Ingres with information released by System R, The project was eventually commercialized by Oracle, I.B.M, and Microsoft Silicon Valley vendors, providing powerful software products for businesses and government agencies.

Today, Stone Blake is bullish on the potential for speeding databases. As the level of computer hardware improves rapidly, he explains, the new software can provide enterprises and researchers with more intelligent and efficient services to help them analyze the massive data from various data sources, including network browsing trails, sensor data, genetic testing and stock trading, from which valuable data analysis reference is extracted.

Stone Blake, already 68 years old this year, is now co-founder and CTO at 2 data-driven start-ups--voltdb and PARADIGM4. "The time has come and the economic and technical conditions are ripe," he said, a part-time professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ”

Stone Blake said it was not unreasonable. These new technologies, though, have raised a number of social problems, including privacy concerns, and the exact timing is uncertain. But all the bold speculations of the 90 's have now been realized, including the internet's collapse in traditional industries such as media, advertising and retailing.

Scientists and entrepreneurs believe that a range of related technologies have reached critical value (i.e., the digital boiling point), which means that many new products and new features will become possible today. Barriers to technical elements are becoming lower, including powerful, low-cost computing and storage capabilities. Google and Amazon's digital engine space is a typical example.

There is also a fast-growing and cost-reducing technology trend-smart sensors, which are crucial for the development of new automated machines, such as unmanned vehicles and unmanned aircraft for use in the battlefield. Intelligent software, mainly refers to the machine learning algorithm, the promotion of today's hot intelligent technology boom. Two typical cases are IBM Computer Watson Challenge jeopardy! Guessing game champion success and Netflix's smart movie recommendation system.

The development of these technologies has boosted other areas of development, such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and digital analysis and prediction. Jon Kleinberg, a computer scientist at Cornell University (Cornell University), said, "all the elements of technology are exerting their force at the same time, and then detonation produces many new applications and new uses." ”

Experts say the explosive development of technology is actually a stage in the process of technological evolution. Paul Saver (Paul Saffo) is a technology prediction expert, at the same time as a professor of engineering at Stanford University, he likened the concept of technological evolution and evolutionary biology to "intermittent balance", which refers to the long standing static or equilibrium state of a pedigree broken by short-term, explosive evolution. , accompanied by the emergence of a large number of new species. Like biological evolution, technological evolution is cyclical. Experts believe that technology has generally evolved over the years to make breakthroughs in the business world. "Even in Silicon Valley, most of the technology will have to go through 20 years to be successful," Saffo said. ”

The process of technological evolution and its exponential growth characteristics can be discerned from the development of the Internet. In the 1969, only 4 of the world's computers were connected to the Internet, and today computer devices connecting to the Internet broke through 4 billion, including laptops and mobile devices.

The development of early Internet computers was a little noticed. "In fact, in the late 90 's, the Internet grew and the number of computers plugged into 4 million, 8 million, 16 million, 32 million and 64 million was exponentially growing," said Edward Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, Edward Lazosca. But it was only when revolutionary changes came that people began to pay attention to it. ”

Rocket Fuel is a Silicon Valley advertising optimization start-up, founded more than 4 years ago, the purpose is to use artificial intelligence software for marketing advertising services, according to internet users online habits, gender, age and preferences for the user to provide specific advertising content, and can be based on predictive algorithms to deal with the results of advertising data, Improve the effectiveness of marketing activities.

Rocket Fuel Company develops rapidly, this year the staff expands nearly one times, has cooperated The Advertiser to surpass 500, including BMW, Duncan Hines, the good thing Tatsu insurance, Pizza Hut, Ace hardware and so on brand business. Financing amounts to 76 million U.S. dollars, processing 19 billion times a day brand advertising display. Process online ads 10 times per second.

Rocket Fuel, executive officer John, said that some of the company's ideas were actually formed in the 90 's, when he was a medical student at Stanford University who was obsessed with artificial intelligence research, when National Science Foundation Science Foundation, or NSF, and many other institutions will provide support for such projects. In recent years, the creation of artificial intelligence services has become more and more easy, not only the cost reduction, the technical threshold has been reduced, "many are involved in the current basic technology," said John.

For stone Blake, the improvement in the performance of solid-state memory components and the lowering of prices provide a favorable condition for the development of its start-ups. In general, solid-state memory components, or what we call Flash and mobile drives, are mainly used in lightweight consumer products such as music players and smartphones.

Today, however, solid-state memory devices are increasingly being used in mainframe computers to store data as large databases. Some new systems process data 50 times times faster than traditional systems, says Stone. "The data stored in these databases can be used for High-tech exploration," he said. ”

The development of hardware storage components and software technologies allows computers to provide more for us, and other data-filtering software, such as machine learning projects, continues to evolve.

"Without intelligent algorithms, we would not be able to find useful patterns and data analysis references from massive amounts of data, and ultimately the data collected and stored would be of little use," Kleinberg. However, software technology will help us achieve this goal. ”

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)