Big Data: Opportunities and Challenges

by Mark Davis

The last few years have seen a remarkable explosion in thescale of data problems relevant to industry, government and society. Fromgenetic analysis to fraud detection, the scale of the data landscape combinedwith the unstructured nature of the data types has led to new forms ofdistributed information processing and storage. This rising field has come tobe known simply as “big data.” In this article, I describe the big datalandscape, including issues ranging from privacy to distributed computingtechnologies.

Big data has become a pervasive phrase of art that toucheson the application of data trying to solve problems that were previouslydifficult or impossible to attack. Big data has risen from being a datamanagement specialty with focused efforts in national laboratories and socialmedia companies, to being a part of the national conversation. Examples includethe New York Times weighing in on thepossibility of the next industrial revolution germinating out of big data1, and TIMEMagazine covering data analytics in support of the 2012 Obama presidentialcampaign2. It has also become part ofa new thrust in a so-called data-driven science that has the potential topromote rapid innovation in scientific fields.

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