Blogs

As part of the MIT CSAIL bigdata lecture series, Dr. Calvin Andrus who works in Office of the Chief Information Officer at the Central Intelligence Agency, gave a talk on the challenges associated with deploying enterprise-scale analytic engines on top of cloud-based bigdata holdings in a classified environment.

Erik Brynjolfsson, the Director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, the Schussel Family Professor at the MIT Sloan School, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research was the last speaker in the Big Data Lecture Series - Fall 2012.

As part of the Big Data Lecture Series — Fall 2012, Ion Stoica, a Professor at the EECS Department at University of California, Berkeley gave a talk on BDAS (Berkeley Data Analytics Stack). BDAS is an open-source data analytics stack for complex computations on massive data which supports efficient, large-scale in-memory data processing, and allows users and applications to trade between query accuracy, time, and cost.

Alyosha Efros, an associate professor at the Robotics Institute and the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University gave a talk in the Big Data Lecture Series --  Fall 2012 at MIT CSAIL. In his talk he discussed how data-driven techniques can make use of big visual data to tackle computer vision problems which are very hard to model parametrically.

Murli Buluswar, Chief Science Officer for AIG-Property & Casualty gave a talk in the Big Data Lecture Series --  Fall 2012 at MIT CSAIL. In this talk he shared details on how the newly created Science Office in AIG  is starting to shape empirical based decision making in a broad suite of areas including underwriting, claims, marketing, sales, and even human resources. His entire talk revolved around the theme of applying data science to influence  business decisions.

As part of the Big Data Lecture Series -- Fall 2012, Google’s Chris Olston gave a talk on how to manage processing of large data sets. In this talk he gives an overview of his work on large-scale data processing at Yahoo! Research. He begins his talk by introducing two data processing systems: Pig, a dataflow programming environment and Hadoop-based runtime, and Nova, a workflow manager for Pig/Hadoop. Rest of the talk focuses on debugging, and looks at what can be done before, during and after execution of a data processing operation.

As part of the Big Data Lecture Series -- Fall 2012, Google’s Jeff Dean gave a talk on how Google manages to deliver services which involve managing huge amounts of data. In order to make things work over the distributed infrastructure of Google’s several data-centers, they use services and sub-services. Each service uses a protocol to communicate with other services. These protocols are language independent.

EMC TV is putting the spotlight on CSAIL’s new initiative bigdata@CSAIL in a 30-minute piece on the station’s IT Insider show.  Professor and CSAIL Principal Investigator Sam Madden chronicles the challenges and opportunities presented by the field and new research underway at CSAIL.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=367KWPASWtE&feature=player_embedded

SAP writes about the potential economic power behind Big Data in a recent Forbes article.   The article refers to a study published in June 2011 by McKinsey Global Institute that looks at potential for economic impact in specific domains, including Health Care; Public Sector Administration; Retail; Manufacturing; and Personal Location Data.  The report estimates the value of Big Data to US Health Care alone could be more than $300 Billion per year.