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Spring 2014 B B And in other fields Those who study big data say it's a concept that goes beyond the world of business. Data analysis can identify disease trends, improve medical treatment, fight crime, mitigate traffic congestion, even win elections. President Obama's 2012 re-election campaign, for example, employed sophisticated data mining techniques that enabled volunteers to micro- target voters in specific counties in key states. In health care, researchers have found that Google search requests for terms like "flu symptoms" and "flu treatments" spike a couple of weeks before hospital emergency rooms in a particular region see an influx of flu patients. Mining that data means that health care workers can be ready and epidemiologists can help keep the disease from spreading nationwide. Similarly, Ramesh points to the enormous amounts of medical data available on people with epilepsy—information that, properly analyzed, can help doctors treat these patients appropriately and can help epileptics know when a seizure is imminent. Perhaps the most controversial use of big data analysis has been on the government level, with entities such as the National Security Agency coming under fire for what some consider intrusive data- gathering from social media and cellphone calls. But, as Ramesh argues, "The level of terrorism has come down enormously in the world since 9/11, and a major factor is big data analysis. The U.S. and other governments across the world play a central role in this. There is so much signal and noise, and the abili- ty to sift through them is the critical component." Under a grant from the National Science Foundation, Rao is working on a study of Twitter messages that were sent in the immediate after- math of the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013. The goal is to understand how rumors spread and how "anti-rumors" can blunt the harmful effects of rampant speculation. "You've got millions of people tweeting, millions of data points that we can collect," he says. "Each data point, each tweet, gives you a sense of the sentiment at that particu- lar point. You can tell whether the sentiment is conducive to spreading rumors or not." Preparing the next generation The surge of interest in big data and how it can be used is reflected in the School of Management curriculum. The professors say students, who typically have grown up in an era when every product carries a bar code and every visit to a Web page is tracked by cookies, expect to hear about big data applications in all sorts of courses. "The businesses, and thus students as their future employees, are asking for courses that teach database management and data mining and analysis tools, especially geared toward handling big data," Talukdar says. "In my teaching area of marketing, many courses are incorporating relevant data mining and analysis tools together with the use of sample subsets of big data from the real world," such as scanner data that retailers collect at checkout. "You've got millions of people tweeting, millions of data points that we can collect." H. Raghav Rao SUNY Distinguished Service Professor, Management Science and Systems