Big Data: Should we love or hate it?

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Hi Everyone!

I missed to write and share some thoughts from here so much! I hope you missed to read from here, too :) What really motivated to write here after a looong time is an article at here by Dr. Timo Hannay. I would like to thank him from here for his motivation and inspiration.

If you have already clicked the link and caught a glimpse of his opinion, it is a mixture of high level ideas and facts about the relation of big data and science. While he explains what really is going on with the size of the data, he also mentions the aspects of the challenges to approach to the big data. After reading this article, I started to question to myself about my understanding of the big data: is it an opportunity or a trouble for us? Is it a good and useful to have that much information? What are the possible outcomes dealing with that much of data?… :)

I wanted to share some of my findings and comments about the big data as follows:

I really encourage and support the usage of big data and also the investment for that, because this decreases the lack of information for the problems we interest. In other words, I completely agree Timo Hannay’s subtitle that says “Information is Power”. How much we know about the system,  that much we have a better understanding of the system. It reminds me the determinism principle; if you have perfect information, then there is no probability. Thus, if big data can take us closer to the perfect information about the system, we can state the clear conclusion about what will happen. That is, of course, under the assumption that the data we have involves minimal to none noise.

I believe that more than the big data itself, the real problem lies on our approach to handle big data. Even if we can partition the data and find solutions to our problems fast enough, the big picture always a combination of a massive amount of data, which can be always used in a better way. It is difficult to predict which approaches can work better before we actually involve with the data. We can also add noise reduction problems into the picture. Pre-processing and elimination of incorrect information are itself another big problems, that actually sounds exciting to us.

To sum up, I love and support the ongoing research and interest on big data. I enjoy to hear any news related to big data studies, up to date information and opinions about them. Even if this is not my core research topic in near future, I strongly believe that we will have many problems originated from big data studies that will eventually open new perspectives to all of us.

I would like to hear your opinions. What do you think about big data fever? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of it?

Photo by Kainet

Pelin Cay

PhD student at Lehigh University, ISE department. Interested in optimization and healthcare system integration.