Big Data Quotes of the Week: August 24, 2012

Jennifer Chayes, Microsoft

“…the magnitude of the data that we are able to take in now dwarfs anything that we were able to do in the past, and so you need a new scientific method to answer new kinds of questions. It’s really a new age of social science…  In the past, we have had to build models for how we thought people interacted, and now we just let the machine tell us what the answer is by finding patterns in these huge amounts of data… You’ve got to understand that it’s the age of big data and it’s the age of the geek”—Jennifer Chayes, Microsoft

“For a while, people thought, ‘now that I have the data, it would tell me the answer.’ But soon they realized, data doesn’t speak, it only responds.  So the onus comes back to the users (those who want to leverage data for making smarter decisions) to ask the ‘right’ questions”–Piyanka Jain, Aryng

 

“Botany is plagued by the same problem as the rest of science and society: our ability to generate data quickly and cheaply is surpassing our ability to access and analyze it. In this age of big data, scientists facing too much information rely on computers to search large data sets for patterns that are beyond the capability of humans to recognize—but computers can only interpret data based on the strict set of rules in their programming”—Press Release, American Journal of Botany   

 

“[Hadoop] can take a petabyte of data [and] can crunch it into a new petabyte. With Dremel or Drill, you can take a petabyte and produce a terabyte or less”—Tomer Shiran, MapR

“Once we get over ourselves and start rolling up our sleeves, I think big data will fall into three major buckets: Enterprise BI, Civil Engineering, and Customer Relationship Optimization. This is where we’ll see most IT spending, most government oversight, and most early adoption in the next few years”—Alistair Croll

“When I became CIO of the Los Angeles Police Department in 2005, the idea of harnessing data and sharing it internally, and with other police forces, was a new idea. During my tenure with the LAPD, we developed one of the first regional information sharing initiatives in the country. Information sharing is no longer an aspiration, but the table stakes for any successful police department”–Tim Riley, IBM

 

Daily Big Data at Facebook

Big Data at Facebook