The magazine for alumni and friends of the UB School of Management
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Spring 2014 B B An explosion of information Information is power, an old saying goes. It fol- lows, then, that more information means more power. At base, big data is an unimaginable lot of infor- mation—a collection of data sets so large and complex that traditional database management can't handle them. For comparison, the average laptop these days might have 500 gigabytes of hard drive memory (and when was the last time you filled up your hard drive?); Google alone processes more than 24 million giga- bytes of data daily, according to a presentation on business intelligence that H. Raghav Rao, a SUNY Distinguished Service Professor in the Management Science and Systems Department, gave recently in Chennai, India. All that exchange of information adds up: Some estimates say the volume of business data worldwide, across all companies, doubles every 1.2 years. Driving this explosion in available informa- tion is the spread of mobile devices including cellphones (4.6 billion worldwide, Rao says), radio frequency identification tags (more than 30 billion and counting), Web traffic, surveillance cameras, and digital sensors in industrial equip- ment, cars, electrical meters and shipping crates. And, says Ramaswamy Ramesh, professor and chair of management science and systems, the rapid growth of available computer power, including cloud computing and cluster comput- ing, has made it possible for companies and even individuals to analyze big data effectively, an abil- ity once enjoyed only by governments and uni- versities with access to giant supercomputers. Those who study big data define it by four characteristics, Ramesh says: • Volume – the sheer amount of informa- tion to be analyzed. • Velocity – the speed at which information arrives and changes. • Veracity – the trustworthiness of the data. • Variety – the different forms in which data is gathered, from Twitter messages to electrocardiogram results. "The big question is, can this data be put to use?" Ramesh says. "If you're not able to analyze, interpret and apply the data in context, big data is worthless." "If you're not able to analyze, interpret and apply the data in context, big data is worthless." Ramaswamy Ramesh Professor and Chair, Management Science and Systems