Quad Meeting Keynote: “Big Data”

• Wanda Whitney
• October 16, 2012
• Uncategorized
• 314

Highlights:

• little data = can be done on your own workstation
• big data = beyond basic computing
• big data: so much data that you need special handling because of its size
• big data is always moving, as our increasing abilities for more storage, more speed is constantly improving
• Living with Big Data: Challenges and Opportunities report
  • storage systems – redundancy
  • fault tolerance
  • compression
  • debugging
  • performance tuning
  • latency reduction
• Example of big data projects:
  • Google Translate leveraging patterns of language use by reviewing websites with multiple language options (ex: Canadian government websites in English and French), instead of rule-based grammar systems
  • Google Books and the Ngram Viewer to track changes in culture and expressions such as the United States is vs. the United States are
• Implications for librarians – we have the interpersonal relationships and technical database skills to help navigate and organize messy data
• Future big data possibilities for librarians:
  • medical information collection
  • hospital/laboratory/clinical informatics
  • personalized medicine
  • wellness informatics