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Eype John

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  • Consumer applications and technologies
  • Cyber-security
  • Data mining
  • Information architecture
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Apr 28, 2018

Big Data

 Eype John

 

The world is becoming an increasingly digital space as we spend so much of our lives online. Data is gathered from our various devices such as computers and smartphones that collect and transmit information on what we do. We have also arrived at a point in time where our televisions, watches, and even light switches are collecting and transmitting data. As per research, it is believed that if we gathered all the data from the beginning of time till the year 2000, it would be less than the amount of data we now create in a minute. This sensation is revolutionizing our understanding of our world and our place in it and is known as- Big Data.

Big Data was defined by Gartner Inc. as data sets that are large and complex from new data sources. These data sets are so dense that traditional data processors would be incapable of managing them. The reason why Big Data has become so important and integral in our world today is because of the way it is able to be used by companies to address business problems that would have been impossible to do so before. Businesses are using Big Data to better understand and predict customer behavior and optimize and improve business processes.

The use of Big Data in a business environment is already so prominent, there are many examples of its practical use. One of the most widespread use of Big Data is to aid Recommendation Systems. Recommendation Systems are a prominent part of internet use; especially in e-commerce. The biggest e-commerce website today- Amazon- uses Big Data to help their recommendation systems in three stages. First, they track and store data on all customer behavior and activity on their site. For every click the customer makes (a user liking a product, purchasing a product etc.), a record of the event is logged in the database. Next, they use ratings given by customers about products as they reveal how users feel about certain types of products. Lastly, they filter products based on ratings and other user data such as browsing history and shopping tendencies. Although this specific plan is used by Amazon, most e-commerce websites use similar blueprints to enhance their recommendation systems using Big Data.

I found Big Data to be such an appealing topic to look into due to my coursework in MIS 2502. The central focus of MIS 2502 was data analytics and how it could be used to improve business problems. From using MySQL to create transactional databases to using R and other methods to extract data from databases, MIS 2502 laid the groundwork in myself and my classmates on how to begin to deal with the influx of data that is out there in the world due to boom of Big Data.

 

 

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