Doha: The world is projected to produce 8 zettabytes of digital content by 2015, the equivalent of over 100 million years of video, Big Data expert Martha Stone told attendees of Northwestern University in Qatar’s symposium yesterday. 80 percent of this data, she said, continues to be unstructured and disorganised, especially as it is generated by audiences on platforms such as Twitter and YouTube.
Stone, who is a fellow at the University of Oxford’s Reuter’s Institute and leads the World Newsmedia Network, gave a presentation on the use of Big Data in surveillance, and urged people to be mindful and responsible in their use of Big Data. According to Stone, the PRISM programme created by the National Security Agency to track information costs $20m.
“It remains unclear yet what the (US) government is doing with the vast data that is being collated and analysed by artificial intelligence.”
Big Data is a label used to describe data sets with sizes and complexities well beyond the capabilities of day to day statistical software. Analysts argue that the rise of digital and mobile communications have accelerated the growth of these immense databases. During her presentation at NUQ’s symposium “Big Data, Smart Media? Connecting Content, Audience and Information,” Stone also announced that World Newsmedia Network would be holding their next Big Data conference at the Microsoft headquarters in 2014.
Stone spoke alongside several leading Big Data scholars and journalists including NU professor Larry Birnbaum, co-director of the Intelligent Information Laboratory at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, Kathy McKewon Director, Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering at Columbia University, and Darnel Moore, Managing Partner at Perception Consulting, who spoke about how sports marketers can use Big Data to better understand and influence fan behavior.
“Big Data has been studied by a range of experts in their various fields, whether in engineering, computer science or business analytics. The subject has powerful implications for journalists and other media professionals, so we’ve been lucky to be able to gather the right people at the right place, here at NU-Q, to speak to the community about how Big Data can and will affect their world,” said Everette Dennis, Dean and CEO of NU-Q.
The panel included Mohammed Haddad, a Data Journalist at Al Jazeera Network who is responsible for creating visualizations in the newsroom. Haddad used his experience in visually mapping the locations of rebel groups in Syria to explain what a journalist should look for in Big Data.
The Peninsula
