Big data is not really a new concept or phenomenon

"Big Data" is not really a new concept or phenomenon. As early as the 1980, the United States has put forward the concept of "big data". In the past more than 30 years, due to the progress of information technology, the data volume in various fields has been increasing rapidly, and the corporate and academic circles in the United States are constantly discussing this phenomenon and its significance. In the last two years, the concept of "big data" has become increasingly popular and important in the United States. In March 2012, the U.S. federal government announced more than $200 million to launch large data research and development missions and defined large data as a national strategy as important as the Internet and supercomputing in history. Rise to the level of national strategy, because with the data explosion, data collection, preservation, maintenance, sharing, use, and so on tasks, are across all areas, far-reaching phenomenon and challenges. But the most important of these phenomena and challenges is the increased ability of humans to analyze and use data, through the analysis, development and integration of data, human beings can now discover new knowledge and create new value, thus bringing "big knowledge", "Big Technology", "Big Intelligence", "big profit" and "Big development".

In other words, the big data "big", its focus is not on its appearance of "large capacity", but its potential "great value." The significance of large data is far from being confined to the stories of "beer and diapers", which we now relish in many news reports, through data mining and precision marketing. I think that the big data can be called a revolutionary phenomenon, because it is a sign of our human society in the information age, through the knowledge of the era of rapid progress towards the intelligent era.

We may cite one or two examples to illustrate the impact of large data on social formation and the importance of national strategies.

This year, a wave of online education is sweeping the U.S. education sector, a series of new intelligent network learning platform is becoming the focus of innovation and investment in High-tech areas, many of the emerging start-up companies have achieved initial success. Coursera, a renowned online education company, has worked with more than 30 universities, including Princeton, Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania, to open University courses free of charge on the Internet. That is to say, some of these schools now have courses that allow hundreds of thousands of of people around the world to learn simultaneously. Learners around the world can not only listen to the same teacher at the same time, but also do the same homework, receive the same grades and exams as students do. Some schools, even starting to invest in building their own intelligent web-based learning platform, announced this May that Harvard and MIT will invest 60 million of billions of dollars in building an intelligent learning platform and opening it free to the world.

The rise of this intelligent web-based learning platform has aroused wide concern and heated discussion in the United States. The reason for this is that the platform is not as simple as a camera or a video, but a smart platform for behavioral evaluation and induction. For example, by recording the mouse clicks, the computer can record the time that you stay on a slide, judge you in the wrong answer to a question after review, statistics on the number of questions on the Internet, the number of participants in the discussion, found different people on different knowledge points of different responses, and thus summed up what knowledge points need to be repeated or emphasized, Which statements or learning tools are most effective and so on. According to these rules and analysis, the learner's learning behavior is automatically prompted, induced and evaluated to make up for the lack of teacher face-to-face communication guidance.

The Intelligent learning platform is powerful because of the big data behind it. The data of individual learning behavior seems to be disorganized, but when the data accumulates to a certain extent, the behavior of the group presents an order and law on the data. By collecting data, analyzing and summarizing this order and law, we can provide effective guidance and help to learners through computer. Harvard and MIT have opened their learning platform to the world free of charge so that more learners can learn to collect more data to study the behavior patterns of learners around the world, and then to build a better intelligent learning platform.

This example not only shows that data is becoming the foundation of innovation, the wealth of an organization, but also that big data is creating a smarter society. So how do we understand the smart society that is moving forward?

The key to understanding this problem is that, whether it is information, knowledge, or intelligence, in our time, it is the existence of data as a carrier. Data is an objective record of information, and when we give the data to the background, it becomes information, information is the source of knowledge, when the information is extracted from the law, it rises to knowledge, knowledge is the basis of intelligence, when computers, networks can use a certain knowledge to make automatic discrimination and take action for our human work, Intelligence is produced. The information age is characterized by the rapid flow of information, the spread of a large, new information anytime and anywhere available. If the first computer was invented in 1946, human society has been in the information age for more than half a century. It should be said that more than half a century since the rapid development of information technology, we have gone beyond the information age, into the knowledge age. The greatest feature of the age of knowledge is the ubiquity of knowledge, which has become a reality. A variety of structured, systematic information, such as video as the carrier of the course video, has been widely disseminated on the Internet, as long as the heart, knowledge is readily available. The emergence of large data, but also prompted us to move towards the intelligent age, the characteristics of the intelligent age is that ubiquitous computers and networks will, like intelligent people, through automated decision-making, to provide services to mankind. In this era, the management will be more accurate, intelligent, cooperation between people, the task of the docking will be more accurate, the state and social operating costs will be less and less.

Back to the example above, it is not hard to imagine the revolutionary impact of this intelligent learning platform. Schools, once the most important educational resources, good schools are scarce resources. Because of the popularity of this kind of intelligent learning platform, in the near future, elite schools will be accessible to everyone, that is to say, for countries with relatively poor educational resources, the problem of resource scarcity can be alleviated quickly if properly handled. In addition, the emergence of this kind of intelligent learning platform will bring the impact and challenge to the whole education industry, the brand of famous university will undoubtedly become more prominent and popular, what impact will the development space of the General University have? Will they decay? If not, how to attract students? Since the best video resources are available for free, Does the role of teachers need to be adjusted? How to adjust? These are the challenges that need to be considered and faced.

This is just a wave of big data waves in the field of education. It is no exaggeration to say that the impact of large data on the development of human society will be all aspects, immeasurable, any industry will be the impact of large data and impact. Let's take another popular term, "smart city", for example. In recent years, there has been a wave of building intelligent cities both at home and abroad. According to Guo Wei, chairman of the China Digital Board of Directors, the leading company of intelligent cities in the country: At present, more than 60 cities in China have built intelligent cities into the "Twelve-Five" plan, and the intelligent city will become an important driving force for the next round of China's economic growth. But from a higher point of view, the construction of intelligent cities, it's actually a big city. Comprehensive data management problem: First, we should collect more data in the place where the data is not collected before, this is mainly to use the technology of the Internet of things; the second is to make the data of different systems accurately docking, which is the task of system integration; Finally, We also use the technology of data visualization to reveal and display the hidden knowledge in the massive data, so that the wisdom in the data can be directed to the city's managers, decision-makers and the public in an intuitive way. As the most powerful catalyst for the idea of the domestic wisdom City, Mr. Guo Wei also pointed out that the construction of intelligent city is to solve the problem of social governance with information technology, to improve the people's happiness Index, which proves that the application and value of large data is far from the commercial field.

In addition to accelerating corporate innovation and leading a new economic boom, large data can also be a sharp weapon to start a transparent government. These are also the places I have more in the big data: The coming data revolution. The world-famous management consultant, Davenport, has mentioned to me that Chinese governments and companies have ambitious plans in many areas, and this has aroused global concern that these ambitions and plans should now be extended to large data areas. This is the original intention of my writing. With the coming of the new Year, I hope that the Chinese society will expeditiously formulate policies related to large data and introduce concrete measures to seize the opportunities of history and promote the development and progress of society.

2013, I hope to be the big data year of Chinese society.