Challenges of Big Data

For the first time, we can generate databases with tens of millions of entries of users in collective creation processes over the Internet. In turn, we obtain data from a multitude of new sensors, which allow us to collect an increasing number of data that must be processed, structured and managed to transform them into useful information.

There is much to be done, new roads to open — we need to explore innovative paths where business, science, medicine, education, politics, law, and even art collect that massive amount of information and can predict educational trends, treatment of diseases or earthquakes, identify vaccines, monitor new conditions, the optimal amount of electricity we need, or better understand animals and nature, for example.

All this while we continue asking questions about the origin and right of data and information use and the erosion of privacy.

• Every two days, humanity creates as much information as civilization had until 2003.
  
  
• The amount of average information a person is exposed to in a day is the same as that of a 15th-century person who was exposed throughout his life.

When the volume of data exceeds our cognitive capacity, when the traditional tools do not allow processing all the data obtained, we need new methods that will enable us to transform them into useful information: visual and accessible.

What’s the impact?

Information is part of the planet; it is like a part of your nervous system. We can understand big data as the ability to collect, analyze, triangulate and visualize immense amounts of information in real time, something that human beings have never done before.

This new type of tool – big data – is beginning to be used to face some of the most significant challenges of our planet. The global conversation about usage, the tremendous potential of information, and the concerns about who owns the data that you and I produce.

It is essential to recognize the effect mentioned above, collect and analyze vast amounts of information in real-time, and observe how we can live, interact, and grow in this information environment.

Where are we going?

The digital universe evolves so fast that any advance is obsolete in 18 months, imagine what this means and the impact it has on the planet. Although, for now only large companies like IBM and governments think about the use of big data, it is essential that each of us think about how this will ultimately affect our lives.

Big data has been created to do good. However, it could also have unintended consequences, such as the use of this medium for personal purposes. At this time no law governs big data. All the regulation is being decided by big corporations that use it as they want and maybe when we start thinking about it; it’s too late.

The world may one day capitalize on big data for all, but for now, it is one of the most significant challenges humanity faces.

For the first time, computers no longer only help us process information, they are the only ones capable of managing the volumes derived from big data. The human mind can not process the millions of data generated by a particle accelerator. The border between formal sciences and experimental sciences is blurred, and the computer ceases to be an aid to become an indispensable and irreplaceable piece of scientific research.

In the immediate future, the economic value will pass from the services to the data, the algorithms to analyze them and the knowledge that can be extracted.