I’m very happy that Ubiquity just started publishing a symposium on Big Data, where I have a humble contribution as editor and author. The introduction statement of this symposium is available from the ACM website.
For you to get an idea about what this simposium is all about pleasel let me quote the paper:
The term “big data” is something of a misnomer. Every generation of computers since the 1950s has been confronted with problems where data was way too large for the memory and processing power available. This seemed like an inconvenience of the technology that would someday be resolved when the next generation of computers came along. So what is different about big data today? The revolution is happening at the convergence of two trends: the expansion of the internet into billions of computing devices, and the digitization of almost everything. The internet gives us access to vast amounts of data. Digitization creates digital representations for many things once thought to be beyond the reach of computing technology. The result is an explosion of innovation of network-based big data applications and the automation of cognitive tasks. This revolution is introducing what Brynjolfsson and McAfee call the “Second Machine Age.” This symposium will examine this revolution from a number of angles.
Our authors will argue the big data challenge is the not technical problem of moving the maximum amount of bits in the minimum amount of time, but the scientific challenge of formulating methods to represent the complex and entangled systems that we must design and manage to run the modern world. This goes beyond “computational analytics” that abstract statistics from large data sets; “data mining” that discovers useful structures in combined data streams; and “visual analytics” that display multisource data as ingenious maps, color-coded images, and multidimensional videos to aid understanding and inform decisionmaking.
Big Data is a no brainer game changer. Understanding it and more importantly, understanding its implications for society will clear many misconceptions around Big Data. I hope that by reading this symposium we can contribute for some clarification of the field.
[REFERENCE:] Jeffrey Johnson, Peter Denning, David Sousa-Rodrigues, and Kemal A. Delic. Big data, digitization, and social change: Big data (ubiquity symposium). Ubiquity, 2017(December):1:1–1:8, http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3158335 December 2017.