Large scale equipment for power generation, manufacturing, mining, and similarly sized functions are structurally important to the global economy. They turn raw materials into the energy and other products that help keep the economy running.

Consider the gas-turbine electric plant. These installations can involve multiple instances of large scale gas turbines like those manufactured by General Electric and Siemens, and they can supply power for thousands of homes and many jobs.…

What is Hadoop? It’s another wacky name for an open-source software project, but Hadoop was also a significant advancement in the way that companies, governments, and organizations can collect, store, and process data. Companies like Cloudera, Hortonworks, and others have emerged to deliver professional level, Hadoop-based data solutions for the enterprise, while many organizations have built successful Hadoop implementations on their own.

Where the traditional model for data storage…

Emcien founder and Chief Scientist Dr. Roy Marsten contributed this piece to Wired. Read the original Big Data article here.

Death. Many of the discussions around data revolve around death. These discussions are typically pretty mundane. Why do phone calls die? Why do banks go out of…

The great myth of Big Data is that it’s defining characteristic is size. In spite of the warnings about Variety and Velocity, in addition to every other V-word out there, the world has been obsessively focused on the collection of bigger and bigger data. But the key to extracting valuable information from data isn’t actually the size of the database, but your ability to make the most out of the data that you have.

In the NFL, scouts don’t simply identify talent by…

Organizations everywhere are beginning to feel mounting pressure to collect and store any form of data they can get their hands on. From nonprofits collecting data on the populations they serve to social media giants looking for ways to monetize, data of any kind is the raw good that most organizations this century will look to spin into piles of gold.

Georgia is a vibrant technology hub with strong entrepreneurial influences. As home to 13 Fortune 500 companies, the world’s busiest airport, and major research universities, our state is uniquely positioned to be on the cutting edge of technology, and specifically Big Data because its impact is truly cross sector.

Last Friday, the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) announced the Top 40 Innovative Technology Companies in Georgia. We were…

The state of data analysis today is one of marginal increases in speed and ease of use. Combined with a shortage of skilled analysts and data scientists, our progress towards better storage and greater processing speed has led to a gap in the state of modern analytics. While companies continue to address data problems with personnel and storage, that gap continues to widen. The most common method for addressing this gap today is Machine Learning, but machine learning efforts have proven…

AmericanBanker.com reported recently on a phenomenon they characterized as “The Downside of the Data Driven Decision.” The LA Times first uncovered Wells Fargo’s quota of eight consumer products per account. The story described questionable tactics used by bank employees to meet that goal. American Banker quickly picked up on the…

It’s prediction time again. With all of the certainty that many outlets are predicting for 2014, we decided to look a little farther ahead. Here are some predictions about the ways that real-time data analytics will change our lives.

The Data-Driven Life

Outcomes are an important motivator in the business world and beyond, but just how much are companies driven by the end goal that inspired their whole enterprise? What if the process of…

The Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Sentinel Network monitors the history of fraud and identity theft complaints. Their report on calendar year 2012 highlights the 2,061,495 cases of fraud, identity theft, and other infractions that were reported to the organization from every state, with Florida, Georgia and California leading with the most reports. That’s over 2 million cases of fraud and theft that were reported, but what of the ones that went undetected? While some…

This week, many of us will gather around the Thanksgiving turkey to feast and give thanks. But sometimes dinner with the extended family can feel a bit chaotic: kids running around, in-laws complaining that they don’t see enough of the grandkids, grandparents giving a litany of their aches and pains, and you’re probably thinking about work.

We’re all coming from different interests, different needs, and different concerns. As a result, communication becomes complicated because…

In the spring of 2009, the White House launched the website Data.gov with the goal of increasing public access to the data that various government agencies create and collect through their regular operations.

The federal government further hoped that with the release of so much data, the resources of the private sector would take hold and create the kinds of applications that would not be possible with government resources and restrictions.…

Financial services firms have found themselves the keepers of reams of valuable data in the midst of the Big Data revolution. While the collection of this data wasn’t entirely unplanned, its potential value far surpasses any expectations the collectors might have had. Hidden within that data are the secrets of how and why money moves. The winners in this shift will be the banks that can extract good information quickly and easily from their data and turn it into a benefit for themselves and…

Knowing what, when, how, and where customers are buying is important information. So important in fact that one online retail giant has built an empire around their suggestive selling methods. True customer knowledge is a complex challenge, but not so much that only the largest corporations have the ability to turn sales data into profits.

Consider S.P. Richards, an office supply distribution company that sources individual distributors, online…

Many manufacturers struggle with the expansion of their product offerings. Pressure from sales teams and their customers cause manufacturers to build out an increasingly complex list of product choices. Meanwhile, the product teams are often focused on meeting these requests without a broader view of how additional options will affect sales or the organization as a whole.

Configurable products have their own kind of complexity. This is not the typical “big data” complexity,…

Analytics projects range in scale and complexity, but every analyst eventually runs into the same problem. Regardless of the kind of data you’re working with or the size of the project, from a mid-sized manufacturer to a project that truly is Big Data, businesses look to analytics and BI tools because the scope and complexity of the data is obscuring critical information. Organizations spend a great deal of time and resources creating models and running queries trying to get a more…

An executive from IBM recently highlighted the need for more rigorous preparation for Big Data analytics within and beyond the financial industry inan article in the Wall Street Journal. The article outlined the dire need for qualified data scientists, how qualified business and finance students are, and how even liberal arts majors can and should be trained to…

Ronald Coase died last week. Coase was an economist and a Nobel laureate, not someone you would typically associate with modern data analytics. Still, Coase is noted in the field for coining the phrase, “If you torture data long enough it will confess.”

Coase’s quote, and his career, are reminders that analysis can have repercussions that go beyond the screen and the analysis, and have impacts on the work that we do…

There have been 5 summers since former Wired Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson published an article about Big Data that concluded with the following statement: “Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.” Big Data is not only changing science–it’s changing the way businesses interact with and gain insight…

Data projects are becoming a necessity across industries, and they’re intimidating analysts and managers alike. The data is there, lurking in the back of workers’ minds and invading everyone’s thoughts, planting seeds of uncertainty into decisions because companies just don’t know what they don’t know.

The development of a successful data analytics project doesn’t have to be so imposing that it stalls the work that needs to be done. Developing an outcome-driven analytics…