![AAAS 2012 Annual Meeting [image courtesy AAAS].](http://www.cccblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/aaas.jpg "AAAS 2012 Annual Meeting [image courtesy AAAS].")
Early last Saturday morning, I had the privilege and pleasure of organizing and moderating a symposium at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) 2012 Annual Meeting in Vancouver. The 90-minute session — titled Data to Knowledge to Action: Computational Science in a Global Knowledge Society – sought to describe how advances in computing research are enabling a “data to knowledge to action” pipeline that is increasingly critical for facilitating a 21st-century global knowledge society. Over 70 people packed into a small room in the Vancouver Convention Center to hear the session’s featured speakers, Eric Horvitz, Peter Stone, and Deborah Estrin (slide shows after the jump).
Archive for the ‘research news’ category
Big Data at the AAAS Annual Meeting
February 21st, 2012LIVE Video Today: The Impact of NITRD
February 16th, 2012
Beginning at 8:15am EST today, we will be streaming live via the web an all-day symposium – titled The Impact of NITRD: Two Decades of Game-Changing Breakthroughs in Networking and Information Technology – marking two decades of the Federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program. Watch it live following the link!
“The Age of Big Data”
February 12th, 2012A great piece about Big Data in today’s New York Times by technology reporter Steve Lohr:
GOOD with numbers? Fascinated by data? The sound you hear is opportunity knocking.
Mo Zhou was snapped up by I.B.M. last summer, as a freshly minted Yale M.B.A., to join the technology company’s fast-growing ranks of data consultants. They help businesses make sense of an explosion of data — Web traffic and social network comments, as well as software and sensors that monitor shipments, suppliers and customers — to guide decisions, trim costs and lift sales. “I’ve always had a love of numbers,” says Ms. Zhou, whose job as a data analyst suits her skills.
To exploit the data flood, America will need many more like her. A report last year by the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm, projected that the United States needs 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired.
The impact of data abundance extends well beyond business. Justin Grimmer, for example, is one of the new breed of political scientists. A 28-year-old assistant professor at Stanford, he combined math with political science in his undergraduate and graduate studies, seeing “an opportunity because the discipline is becoming increasingly data-intensive.” His research involves the computer-automated analysis of blog postings, Congressional speeches and press releases, and news articles, looking for insights into how political ideas spread.
The story is similar in fields as varied as science and sports, advertising and public health — a drift toward data-driven discovery and decision-making. “It’s a revolution,” says Gary King, director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. “We’re really just getting under way. But the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched.”
Welcome to the Age of Big Data [more following the link]…
