Big Data

We're told how it's going to change everything, and truly we now exist in a sea of information:

This explosion of data is relatively new. As recently as the year 2000, only one-quarter of all the world’s stored information was digital. The rest was preserved on paper, film, and other analog media. But because the amount of digital data expands so quickly -- doubling around every three years -- that situation was swiftly inverted. Today, less than two percent of all stored information is nondigital.

Given this massive scale, it is tempting to understand big data solely in terms of size. But that would be misleading. Big data is also characterized by the ability to render into data many aspects of the world that have never been quantified before; call it “datafication.” For example, location has been datafied, first with the invention of longitude and latitude, and more recently with GPS satellite systems. Words are treated as data when computers mine centuries’ worth of books. Even friendships and “likes” are datafied, via Facebook.

What does all of this mean for campus and the wider communities it supports and communicates with?

Next week, on May 3, UGA welcomes Richard Moore to talk publicly about just that. Big Data Infrastructure: from National Resources to Campus Requirements, a colloquium sponsored by the department of computer science, OVPR, the Franklin College and the department of management information systems will take place in Conner Hall at 3 p.m. Moore, deputy director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, will discuss:

The scientific challenges and opportunities of the BIG DATA era drive the infrastructure requirements at both the national scale and the campus level. This talk describes some of the data initiatives at SDSC, both as a national NSF center focusing on data-intensive computing, as well as a key player in the UCSD campus' Research Cyberinfrastructure

(RCI) program to develop shared cyberinfrastructure for campus researchers.  The talk includes the results from a recently-completed campus survey on emerging campus-level storage and data requirements, as well as experiences and recommendations from a set of curation pilot projects, wherein staff from the University Library worked alongside six research teams for ~18 months to curate scientists' research data.