Upskill Yourself with Big Data

On 13th June 2020, Girls in Tech Indonesia in collaboration with Study in New Zealand held Arisan Digital online via Zoom. Arisan Digital is a monthly regular meeting that ends up with some lucky winners will get lottery / sponsored gifts. This event was free and gathered all women from various backgrounds. The session was delivered by Dr. Trang Do, IT Lecturer dan Data Scientist from Wellington Institute of Technology and Whitereia New Zealand.

What is Data?

Data (treated as singular, plural, or as a mass noun) is any sequence of one or more symbols given meaning by a specific act(s) of interpretation. Digital data is data that is represented using the binary number system of ones (1) and zeros (0), as opposed to analog representation.

What is Big Data?

Big Data is also data but with a huge size. Big data is larger, more complex data sets, especially from new data sources. Big data is any kind of data characterized by high volume, variety, and/or velocity, which are difficult to process using traditional database management tools or data processing applications. Big Data is normally growing exponentially with time. The amount of digital data in the universe is growing, doubling every two years, and changing how we live in the world.

Examples of Big Data

1. New York Stock Exchange generates about one Terabyte of new trade data per day.

2. The statistic shows that 500+ Terabytes of new data get ingested into the databases of social media site Facebook, every day. This data is mainly generated in terms of photo and video uploads, message exchanges, putting comments etc.

3. A single Jet engine can generate 10+ Terabytes of data in 30 minutes of flight time. With many thousand flights per day, the generation of data reaches up to many Petabytes.

Characteristics of Big Data

Big Data can be defined by one or more of the characteristics: volume, velocity, variety, and veracity.

1. Volume: The name Big Data itself is related to a size that is enormous. The size of data plays a very crucial role in determining value out of data.

2. Velocity: The term ‘Velocity’ refers to the speed of generation of data. How fast the data is generated and processed to meet the demands, determines real potential in the data.

3. Variety: Variety refers to the types of data. Variety of Big Data refers to structured, unstructured, and semistructured data that is gathered from multiple sources.

4. Veracity: Veracity refers to the quality of data.

Benefits of Big Data Processing

1. Health care:

– Advanced patient care: Electronic health records help in collecting demographic and medical data such as lab tests, clinical data, diagnoses, and medical conditions, which helps healthcare practitioners to provide quality care.

– Improve operational efficiency: Healthcare companies use big data as a part of their business intelligence strategy to examine historical patient admission rates and to analyze staff efficiency.

– Finding a cure for diseases: Big data can help in uncovering unknown correlations, hidden patterns, and insights by examining large sets of data. By applying machine learning, big data can study human genomes and find the correct treatment or drugs to treat cancer.

2. Science:

– Geography: A large volume of geographical data, such as earth observation satellite images and mobile Internet data, are collected collectively or individually.

– Bioinformatics: A combination of big data and bioinformatics is seemingly impeccable and has some amazing benefits in fields of the genomic sequence, protein sequence, and DNA computing, etc.

– Astronomy: Astronomy is one of the fields which has a higher usage of big data with its present advancement. The continuing development of ground and space-based observatories, including large sky surveys, brings Astronomy to the Big Data era.

3. Business:

– Automation: Big data has the potential to improve internal efficiencies and operations through robotic process automation. Huge amounts of real-time data can be immediately analyzed and built into business processes for automated decision making.

– In-depth insights: Big data can also be used to discover hidden opportunities that were unknown to organizations before the ability to review large sets of data. Complex data sets can even be used to develop new products or enhance existing ones. Proprietary data within the market can prove invaluable in the competitive landscape.

– Faster, better decision making: With the speed of data analytics technology, paired with the ability to analyze new sources of data, businesses are now able to analyze information instantly and make smart, informed decisions.

– Online Reputation and Relationship management: Using Big Data tools helps us to gather feedback and allows us to see what people are saying about our brand. Getting involved in the conversation can help a company protect its reputation while constantly monitoring the business.