Big Data is really the "new oil of the future"

Currently the hottest topic in the IT industry should be Big Data, a concept that was hyped up only two years ago, and is now ubiquitous, occupying half of the Internet, which, along with Cloud Computing, has become the most important element in the future development of information technology. People in the IT industry, if you don't know big data, don't understand the mythological stories created by big data, it seems to have failed to keep up with the development of information technology, become the laggards of the times.

So what is big data? No one can give a definite answer yet, it is an image but a generalized concept like cloud computing. The consensus understanding is to describe the connotation of this concept from the perspective of the 4Vs. The so-called 4V is to say that big data has a huge volume (Volume), variety (Variety), real-time processing (Velocity), data real (Veracity) characteristics. The development of information technology, so that the Internet in every corner of the world, a variety of information can be disseminated through the network. Everything that happens in the world, every human thinking, every point of progress in society, every increase in knowledge can be brought together through the Internet. Networking, sensing, and radio-frequency technologies make it possible to generate large amounts of data about all kinds of things. The content, space-time, location, and characteristics of things can be transformed into data, and these economic, social, normative, messy, simple, complex, and other kinds of data represent the content of different things. The huge amount of data representing different things can be gathered through the network, and the overall data after gathering reflects the essential characteristics or development trend of things. This kind of data reacting to the essential characteristics or development trend of things has a certain value, which can be extracted from the big data through the data extraction, value analysis, data expression and other big data technologies of high-performance computers. Different values can be extracted from different needs, and all the values can be served for human beings, which is the essence of big data.

Big data, a distinctive and graphic concept is so compelling because many big companies like Amazon and Google have made up countless mythological stories about it. Each story tells of the omnipotent insights of big data. It can predict the future like a great prophet, use arcane correlations to speculate on people's preferences, use spoiled data to peer into people's hearts, use trend analysis to guide people's behavior, and even use the development curve of things to control people's thinking and change the direction of human society.

The place where big data is utilized the most is the business field. We all know the story of diapers and beer, through big data analysis to find out the correlation between these two unrelated things, the use of recommender systems, to provide different users with different product marketing solutions to improve product sales; another well-known story is the case of teenage pregnancy through the shopping record to analyze the user's purchasing behavior, through the analysis of the user's purchase behavior, to speculate the user's current state and future needs. Although this case has been widely criticized for violating other people's privacy, it illustrates the value of big data analytics in the business world. There are countless other stories of one kind or another, all of which illustrate the great role of big data in analyzing people's preferences and buying habits, and using this kind of analysis, businessmen can conduct better marketing. Authoritative market research institutions say that big data will change the future rules of business, real-time bidding system (RTB), more intelligent recommendation system and business intelligence analysis based on big data (BA), so that enterprises can produce more suitable for the user's preferences of the product, to find a better way to market the product to the user, to provide better service for the user, and to utilize the limited resources to generate more These functions of big data will enable faster and better economic and social development.

Another application of big data is the field of social public ****. Utilizing big data, the government can better manage the society and provide better public **** services for the society; the education sector can better acquire and disseminate knowledge to improve the quality of the people; the health sector can predict the occurrence of major epidemic diseases and make early warning in advance; the security sector can monitor the social situation to ensure that the country is not damaged. Google has used big data to draw a "world flu map" [1] to help people understand the incidence of influenza around the world; the use of big data to predict the outbreak of avian influenza around the trend for the public to provide preventive advice to the health sector to provide monitoring information. In the field of public **** security, big data also has a huge role to play, such as the United States has established a network monitoring system based on a variety of sensor technology and big data technology, to predict the occurrence of major social and public **** events, such as the outbreak of large-scale marching activities, possible terrorist attacks, etc..

With the development of technology, the application of big data also extends to the field of personal services. The creation of wearable devices marks the development of information technology to a human-centered stage. Wearable devices like Google Glass and Apple Watch combine technology with the human body, making it easier for humans to access information. These wearable devices utilize big data to provide individuals with data services for learning, living, health and more. Big data plays its role through wearables, while the wearables themselves become a source for collecting data and building big data. The wearable device serves as a tool, and big data is what it serves.

Big data has such a huge role to play, so that some information technology developed countries pay more attention, many large information companies also take big data as the focus of the company's future development. The United States is today the world's most important to the development of big data, but also the use of big data better countries. The U.S. government takes big data as the top priority for future information technology development, believing that big data will cause a revolution in information technology development and change the development mode of the future society. in March 2012, the U.S. government released the "Big Data Research and Development Initiative", which called big data "the new oil for the future development of society", and raised the development of big data research to the height of national strategy. research to the height of national strategy. In order to control this "new oil of the future" and lead the direction of world technological development, the federal government has formulated the Big Data Research and Development Program to promote scientific and technological research and innovation discovery by relevant research institutions. Improve the method of extracting value from massive data, improve the ability to obtain knowledge from data, accelerate the pace of the United States in the field of science and technology, to ensure that the United States in the field of information technology leadership. The U.S. government has designated six federal departments, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Energy (DOE), the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), as responsible for advancing big data research, and plans to invest $200 million in research on technologies for collecting, storing, retaining, managing, analyzing, and **** enjoying technologies for collecting, storing, managing, analyzing and ****enjoying massive amounts of data.

The government's investment and policy support have made companies that were already focused on big data research more proactive, and have increased their investment in big data research and development and utilization, with considerable success. Such as Apache Foundation developed Hadoop distributed processing system, after continuous development and improvement, has now become the standard structure of big data processing; Microsoft developed the Windows Azure platform to make the processing of big data more humanized, simplified; there are other companies, after continuous innovation and research to make the big data technology is more perfect, more practical. The development of technology makes the value of big data more prominent, and people's expectations for it also continue to rise. It is said that Google's use of big data can not only predict the occurrence of influenza, but also predict the economic recovery of the United States; not only can predict the popular color of next year's clothing, but also predict whether a certain entertainment star can be red all over the world. Google's most recent big data case is that it predicted most of the Oscar winners at the 2013 Oscars, and Facebook is also a typical company that utilizes big data, which is the social networking site's greatest value. By analyzing large amounts of social information, Facebook can understand users' habits and purchasing preferences, and use targeted recommendation ads to generate tens of billions of dollars a year for the young company.

There are many other wonderful stories, real or fabricated, about big data, each of which responds to the huge role of big data in a particular area, and the compilation of which paints a picture of a fantasy world dominated by big data. There, people using big data can predict the trend of any one thing and can accomplish all the impossible things. Every person is a prophet and a wise man, and with the support of big data, every person knows astronomy and geography, and knows a thousand things before and eight hundred things after, and is as proficient in eighteen martial arts as the Great Sage of Qi Tian. However, is this really the case?

Unfortunately, the ideal is very rich, the realization is very bone. At least at the moment, big data isn't so magical, and even the story that Google said it could use people's search terms to predict the development of the flu, which everyone believes in, didn't happen. When H7N9 appeared in China, Google failed to give any prediction about the occurrence and development of this flu, not to mention giving people a warning in advance to remind people to take precautions; Europe's financial crisis lasted five or six years, so far, no big data company can predict when the financial crisis will end, and even the direction of the future is to the good or to the bad development can not be predicted; in the field of business, personalized In the business world, personalized advertising recommendations are something that should be done well, but big data has also failed to show its super power. The Taobao personalized recommendation system, which has recently been transformed by big data, is not much better than it was five or six years ago; and none of the books recommended on Amazon.com, which claims to have used big data to dramatically increase book sales, are to my liking.

April 15, 2013, the Boston Marathon site of the terrorist attacks that shocked the world [4]. Americans sadly found that those network surveillance systems based on modern information technology and big data analysis did not ensure the security of the country, and big data analysis is not as effective as one would expect in preventing terrorist attacks. It seems that this big data, which is known as the high point of future technological competition, is not yet as useful as people expect at the moment.

The reason for this pessimism is that while big data may represent the future direction of information technology development and have a bright future. But in the case that people's awareness and related supporting technologies have not yet been developed, big data can not yet play its great role. Secondly, there is no precise definition of big data, and its connotation cannot be clearly interpreted. The United States big data is called "the new oil of the future", but the oil is not renewable, but the data are generated at any time and any place, the more data generated later, the higher the accuracy of the data, the stronger the ability to process the data, which allows people to collect and possess a large amount of data on the necessity of doubt now; and from big data extract value from big data, first of all, there must be demand, without demand, we do not know what to extract from big data, when people's thinking has not yet developed to the point where they can fully control the data, and do not know what the big data is really useful, it is difficult to generate demand for it; without demand, there is no data collection direction, and collection without a direction will result in a huge waste; in the absence of a clear direction, the only thing that can be done is to collect all possible data, but this is not only the collection of data, but the collection of data, and the collection of data. When the direction is not clear, the only thing to do is to collect all possible data, but this will not only cause great cost for data storage and management, but also some legal problems, such as whether it will violate other people's privacy and so on. In addition, with the development of technology, wearable devices will continue to be intelligent and popularized in the life, this human-centered intelligent devices itself will continue to analyze the data obtained, extract personal preferences and other characteristics, learning and adapting to the character of the individual, with the characteristics of the human character, which makes the analysis of the human character from the big data lose its significance.

All of the above makes people skeptical about the future of big data development. Therefore, while the United States has formulated a strategy for the development of big data, viewing it as the "new oil of the future," the rest of the world, although also attaching great importance to the development of this technology, has not formulated a relevant development strategy. It is possible that other countries are lagging behind the United States in terms of big data technology and are not yet able to formulate clear development goals, or that people still do not have a clear understanding of the prospects for the development of this technology, and are not sure whether big data can really lead the direction of future technological development. Therefore, let's just forget about Big Data for now! Stop focusing on those sizzling conceptual hype, and settle down to think seriously about the real meaning of Big Data.

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