It’s a really exciting time to be in the data analytics space. We’re at the start of a whole new era—the convergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), big data and artificial intelligence (AI). The convergence of these three technologies has the potential to not only automate analytics and decision making, but to actually automate the learning that happens in between. You can think of this as having robots in your data.
Visualise a continuous feedback loop where data from smart devices is collected and analysed, with the insights automatically fed into business processes or even the smart device itself. Every business and every person stands to benefit not only from better information, but from automation that can provide nearly instantaneous response.
Organisations are already gearing up to implement AI into their analytics and apply it to big data, some of that coming from the IoT. Forresterresearch finds that their investments in AI are expected to increase 300 per cent as compared to last year. It will be interesting to see the different ways in which AI gets incorporated into products and services. However, the thought of this kind of automation has some in the data industry fearing for their jobs.
We’ve all experienced some form of what I will call “smart data.” Anyone who has ever shopped on eBay or Amazon has been presented with suggested items to buy based on previously viewed items. While those recommendations continue to get smarter, fascinating things are happening in other industries.
The medical industry is ripe with opportunity. Forbesmentions a study that used computer-aided diagnosis to review the early mammograms of women who later developed breast cancer. Through artificial intelligence, specifically Machine Learning, the data model was able to identify 52 per cent of the cancers as much as a year before the women were diagnosed.
We are already seeing integration in the automotive industry, but we can expect much more. According to IBM’s report Automotive 2025: Industry without borders, the car of the future will be “sophisticated enough to configure itself to a driver and other occupants. It will be able to learn, heal, drive and socialise with other vehicles and its surrounding environment.” I expect we will actually see that happen much sooner.
Natural language processing, or the ability for computers to understand and process spoken and written words, is gaining in sophistication thanks to machine learning and big data. It works on pulling meaning from unstructured text data. The result could be used to understand customer sentiment data or to provide help reviewing large volume legal documents in preparation for a trial.
So many things, in so many aspects of our lives, are constantly collecting data. For consumers, smart devices, smart homes, wearables, and even our cars are producing data every day in amounts that are difficult to wrap our minds around. IDCsays that by 2020, there will be 44 zettabytes of data, nearly as many bytes as stars in our universe. It also says we have only been able to analyse 5 per cent of our data. So much data goes unused, but that is all about to change.
Data storage technology has improved and prices have come way down, allowing organisations to collect and store massive amounts of all types of data culminating in big data.
