ENTRIES TAGGED "strata"
Big data, cool kids
Making sense of the hype-cycle scuffle.
The big data world is a confusing place. We’re no longer in a market dominated mostly by relational databases, and the alternatives have multiplied in a baby boom of diversity.
My data is bigger than yours.
These child prodigies of the data scene show great promise but spend a lot of time knocking each other around in the schoolyard. Their egos can sometimes be too big to accept that everybody has their place, and eyeball-seeking media certainly doesn’t help.
POPULAR KID: Look at me! Big data is the hotness!
HADOOP: My data’s bigger than yours!
SCIPY: Size isn’t everything, Hadoop! The bigger they come, the harder they fall. And aren’t you named after a toy elephant?
R: Backward sentences mine be, but great power contains large brain.
EVERYONE: Huh?
SQL: Oh, so you all want to be friends again now, eh?!
POPULAR KID: Yeah, what SQL said! Nobody really needs big data; it’s all about small data, dummy.
On the importance of imagination in data science
Strata Community Profile on Amy Heineike, Director of Mathematics
Amy Heineike
According to Amy Heineike, the Director of Mathematics at Quid, there’s nothing like having a fresh dataset in R and knowing how to use it. “You can add a few lines of code and discover all kinds of interesting information,” Heineike says. “One question leads to another, you get into a flow, and you can have an amazing exploration.”
Heineike started working with data several years ago at a consultancy in London, where “playing around” with data shed light on the impact of social networks on government policies. Part of her job was figuring out what types of data to use in order to find solutions to crucial problems, from public transportation to obesity. Her day-to-day work at Quid entails working with new data sets, prototyping analytics, and collaborating with an engineering team to improve data analysis and bring products into production.
why? why? why!
a lesson for data science teams
By Dean Malmgren and Mike Stringer
The other day we had a conversation with a bespectacled senior data scientist at another organization (named X to protect the innocent). The conversation went something like this:
Many of us have had similar conversations with people like X, and many of us have even been X before. Data scientists, being curious individuals, enjoy working on problems for the sake of doing something interesting, fun, technically challenging, or because their boss heard about “big data” in the Wall Street Journal. These reasons are all distinctly different from trying to solve an important problem.
Pursuing data science as a second profession
Featured Strata Community Profile on Yogi Saxena
Yogi Saxena is not one to back down from a challenge. The distance runner ran in his first marathon just two years ago in order to win a bet. Next month, he competes in another grueling marathon, his third. And if that were not enough, a friend’s Facebook post inspired him to train for a sprint triathalon. “I taught myself to swim when I was young,” Saxena says, revealing that his drive to learn new skills started early. “And if it wasn’t for the swim part, I’d have done an Olympic-distance triathlon instead.”
Saxena’s love of mastering new challenges is likely responsible for his decision to pursue data science as a second profession, after having a successful career as an electrical engineer. Currently at Boeing, he is responsible for developing a tool that would help visualize feeds from various classified and non-classified sources.
He is profiled here as part of the Strata community profiles.
On reading Mike Barlow’s “Real-Time Big Data Analytics: Emerging Architecture”
Barlow's distilled insights regarding the ever evolving definition of real time big data analytics
Reading Barlow on a Sunday afternoon
During a break in between offsite meetings that Edd and I were attending the other day, he asked me, “did you read the Barlow piece?”
“Umm, no.” I replied sheepishly. Insert a sidelong glance from Edd that said much without saying anything aloud. He’s really good at that.
In my utterly meager defense, Mike Loukides is the editor on Mike Barlow’s Real-Time Big Data Analytics: Emerging Architecture. As Loukides is one of the core drivers behind O’Reilly’s book publishing program and someone who I perceive to be an unofficial boss of my own choosing, I am not really inclined to worry about things that I really don’t need to worry about. Then I started getting not-so-subtle inquiries from additional people asking if I would consider reviewing the manuscript for the Strata community site. This resulted in me emailing Loukides for a copy and sitting in a local cafe on a Sunday afternoon to read through the manuscript.
Big data is dead, long live big data: Thoughts heading to Strata
The biggest problems will almost always be those for which the size of the data is part of the problem.
A recent VentureBeat article argues that “Big Data” is dead. It’s been killed by marketers. That’s an understandable frustration (and a little ironic to read about it in that particular venue). As I said sarcastically the other day, “Put your Big Data in the Cloud with a Hadoop.”
You don’t have to read much industry news to get the sense that “big data” is sliding into the trough of Gartner’s hype curve. That’s natural. Regardless of the technology, the trough of the hype cycle is driven by by a familiar set of causes: it’s fed by over-agressive marketing, the longing for a silver bullet that doesn’t exist, and the desire to spout the newest buzzwords. All of these phenomena breed cynicism. Perhaps the most dangerous is the technologist who never understands the limitations of data, never understands what data isn’t telling you, or never understands that if you ask the wrong questions, you’ll certainly get the wrong answers.
Big data is not a term I’m particularly fond of. It’s just data, regardless of the size. But I do like Roger Magoulas’ definition of “big data”: big data is when the size of the data becomes part of the problem. I like that definition because it scales. It was meaningful in 1960, when “big data” was a couple of megabytes. It will be meaningful in 2030, when we all have petabyte laptops, or eyeglasses connected directly to Google’s yottabyte cloud. It’s not convenient for marketing, I admit; today’s “Big Data!!! With Hadoop And Other Essential Nutrients Added” is tomorrow’s “not so big data, small data actually.” Marketing, for better or for worse, will deal. Read more…
Tips and Tricks for Debugging Distributed Systems
Preview of upcoming session at the Strata Conference
I’m talking on Wednesday at Strata about Tips and Tricks for Debugging Distributed Systems. You should come check it out.
As a preview, let’s talk about two pretty pictures.
Network Visualization
I’m running some typical distributed systems (HDFS, MapReduce, Impala, HBase, Zookeeper) on a small, seven-node cluster. The diagram above has individual processes and the TCP connections they’ve established to each other. Some processes are “masters” and they end up talking to many other processes.
How the world communicates in 2013
Sneak Peek at Upcoming Session at Strata Santa Clara 2013
By Robert Munro
Plain text is the world’s largest source of digital information. As the amount of unstructured text grows, so does the percentage of text that is not in English. The majority of the world’s data is now unstructured text outside of English. So unless you’re an exceptional polyglot, you can’t understand most of what’s out there, even if you want to.
Language technologies underlie many of our daily activities. Search engines, spam filtering, and news personalization (including your social media feeds) all employ smart, adaptive knowledge of how we communicate. We can automate many of these tasks well, but there are places where we fall short. For example, the world’s most spoken language, Mandarin Chinese, is typically written without spaces. “解放大道” can mean “Liberation Avenue” or “Solution Enlarged Road” depending on where you interpret the gaps. It’s a kind of ambiguity that we only need to worry about in English when we’re registering domain names and inventing hashtags (something the folk at “Who Represents” didn’t worry about enough). For Chinese, we still don’t get it right with automated systems: the best systems get an error every 20 words or so. We face similar problems for about a quarter of the world’s data. We can’t even reliably tell you what the words are, let alone extract complex information at scale.
Sketching techniques for real-time big data
Preview of an upcoming session at Strata Santa Clara
Bahman Bahmani
In many modern web and big data applications the data arrives in a streaming fashion and needs to be processed on the fly. In these applications, the data is usually too large to fit in main memory, and the computations need to be done incrementally upon arrival of new pieces of data. Sketching techniques allow these applications to be realized with high levels of efficiency in memory, computation, and network communications.
In the algorithms research community, sketching techniques first appeared in the literature in 1980s, e.g., in the seminal work of Philippe Flajolet and G. Nigel Martin, then caught attentions in late 1990s, partially inspired by the award-winning work of Noga Alon, Yossi Matias, and Mario Szegedy, and were/are on fire in 2000’s/2010’s, when sketches got successfully designed not only for fundamental problems such as heavy hitters, but also for matrix computations, network algorithms, and machine learning. These techniques are now at an inflection point in the course of their history, due to the following factors:
1. Untapped potential: Being so new, their huge practical potential has been yet barely tapped into.
2. Breadth and maturity: They are now both broad and mature enough to start to be widely used across a variety of big data applications, and even act as basic building blocks for new highly efficient big data management systems.
Who do you trust? You are surrounded by bots.
Preview of upcoming session "Who is Fake?" at the Strata Conference
By Lutz Finger
In the Matrix, the idea of a computer algorithm determining what we think may seemed far-fetched. Really? Far-fetched? Let’s look at some numbers.
About half of all Americans get their news in digital form. This news is written up by journalists, half of whom at least partially source their stories from social media. They use tools to harvest the real time knowledge of 100,000 tweets per second and more.
But what if someone could influence those tools and create messages that look as though they were part of a common consensus? Or create the appearance of trending?
