Before 2000, things were mainly stored on analog equipment like music on tapes and movies on film. Ever since 2002, with the improvement of obsoleting the poverty, the demand for efficient sharing dramatically increased. Because more people have the opportunity of getting electric devices, the digital age has begun. What differentiates big data from data is the 5v characters: large volume, more variety, high velocity, veracity, and value. The volume usually is the main factor to determine whether it is categorized as big data or not. (more than TB or PB). The term big data was popularized by John Mashey in the 1990s. Currently, the major usage of big data covers a wide range. Other than cloud computing, the data analyzing tech include ML and natural language processing as we mentioned in our previous class. Visualization also considers an expression of big data. The point of having big data is to deal with these massive amounts of data more efficiently than the traditional data processing equipment is unable to handle. However, the storage speed starts to exponentially increase ever since the 1980s. Even though there is one-third of our data are text and still images, it still becomes very crowded. Speaking of its application, I personally think the craze of NFT in 2021 is a sign of the big data explosion. It may represent a new stage of big data. The claim of ownership is what’s really behind NFT, and if the sense of “digital assets” starts to become convincing for the majority group, then it unenviably causes internet traffic. What’s worse is that most of the space will be occupied by the “recreations” (Just something that came to my mind).
Every aspect of our life relates to the application of big data. For example, the usage in a medical community makes sure the patients can receive personalized healthcare, more specifically, by abstracting data from a large database to build a detailed mechanistic model for individual patients. The detailed data source robust the treatment and makes the curative effect more efficient. However, other than the data bias, the data traffic is another major challenge. A single breast tomosynthesis takes nearly 450 MB, which equates to high-resolution commercial photography (besides, a professional photographer takes about 1000 – 2000 photos each shooting, and most of them are wasted in the cloud). Another example of big data usage is the recommendation systems we experience every day. On YouTube, Facebook, online shopping, etc. For example, Netflix, what surprised me most is not just they recommend the categories that seem interests to you, they even switch the covers to tempt their audiences, to let them change their mind. If an audience watches romantic movies a lot, the merchant will extract a clip of a scene of a kissing couple, even if it’s a horror movie or action movie. In this case, you may pass the movie for the first time simply because you didn’t like the content, they still will convince you to reopen it by simply changing a cover. And we as the audience are unable to notice most of the time. There are other examples like google Maps, dating apps, government uses big data to keep records, monitor the crime rates. Environmentally, official institutions can predict the natural disaster five days ahead by observing the exiting data. Other applications occur in education, marketing, social media, etc.
Question: What’s the usage of big data in blockchain?
Resources:
Intro to Big Data: Crash Course Statistics #38. (2018, November 14). [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vku2Bw7Vkfs
Viceconti, M., Hunter, P., & Hose, R. (2015). Big Data, Big Knowledge: Big Data for Personalized Healthcare. IEEE JOURNAL OF BIOMEDICAL AND HEALTH INFORMATICS, 1–2. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7047725
What Is Big Data? (2016, March 7). [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVSfJhssXUA
Wikipedia contributors. (2021, April 12). Big data. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data