Getting a Grip on Big Data
by Angela Guess
Zac Unger has written an article in The Atlantic regarding the struggle to get a hold on Big Data. He writes, “By the standards of a decade ago, each one of us probably owns two or three supercomputers. And with all that raw power comes the ability to gather massive amounts of data. There’s only one problem: Most of that data is garbage. No empire was ever built on 500,000 pictures of cute cats and a Twitter feed about the many uses of avocados. Speaking at The Atlantic’s Big Science Summit on Oct. 30, a wide variety of presenters returned to the theme of Big Data. Whether it’s exploring black holes or streamlining e-commerce, the ability to access, interpret, and synthesize vast volumes of relevant information is the key to success.”
He goes on, “Take air travel, for instance, which is both one of the most valuable and the most infuriating of all modern conveniences. Speaking at the Big Science Summit, NASA’s Parimal Kopardekar spoke about his goal of “[reducing] total cost of air transportation by allowing more aircraft in the sky at the same time, allowing more efficient arrivals.” Doing this involves improving routes and flight plans on the fly as conditions change. Using weather forecasts, ground-based radar, satellite-based information, and sensors on the aircraft themselves will allow air traffic controllers to “fuse all the information from the aircraft and the ground and the trajectories and the airspace and figure out the clean trajectory for the aircraft that would be the most optimal.”
Read more here.
Tags: big data, control, getting a grip, The Atlantic, value, volume
This entry was posted on November 14, 2012 at 12:05 am and is filed under Big Data, Data Daily, Data Topics, News, Unstructured Data. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.