NHC is honored to invite Mr. Albert Hui, Director of Technology at Data Economist Inc., to give a speech on “Trends in Big Data & Analytics”. With over 18 years’ experiences in data technology and being a consultant for 15 years in all different kinds of industries, Mr. Hui shared with his own experiences as a big data evangelist and thoughts on big data technology, industry trends, and career development.
TORONTO, August 15, 2015 – The presentation consisted of 4 main topics: the definition of big data, the reason why big data is happening, technologies in the industry, and future trends.
What’s Big Data?
The term – BIG DATA is not new to us. It has been there for a while since mid-2000s. But it’s now becoming a trendy topic because of today’s huge data explosion. Data is doubling its size every two years, and is expected to continuously grow rapidly from 4.4ZB in 2013 to 44ZB in 2020.
Mr. Hui called big data as a social movement and put it in a witty way, citing that “Big data is like teenage sex, everyone talks about it, nobody really knows how to do it, and everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone claims they are doing it…” But in a formal way, there’re three defining properties or dimensions of big data: variety, velocity, and volume. Variety refers to the number of types or data and there’re structured and unstructured data. Velocity refers to the speed of data processing, from batch to streaming data. Volume refers to the amount of data and it has evolved to zettabytes from terabytes.
The Reason Why Big Data is Happening
Big data is not an accident! Hui pointed out that in today’s world, everyone like you should be considered as the most disruptive as we have entered the age of the customer. Our history has witnessed a revolution from the age of manufacturing in 1900s to the age of distribution in 1960s, and from the age of information in 1990s to the age of the customer in 2010s. Nowadays customers are king and they are more disruptive than technology. Just like Steve Jobs said, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.” Therefore, today businesses need to provide with customer experience to stay in business, and capturing every interaction with your customers (e.g. Website/Twitter behaviours) is of vital importance now. When all these information come together, here comes big data. As Hui stated, one major trend is that big data has become particularly important and popular for median and small sized companies. Newer companies often develop better nowadays since they quickly adopt technology to know their customers.
Technologies
Mr. Hui also introduced several popular technology terms such as
- The Internet of Things (IoT): A scenario in which objects are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. E.g. Fitbit
- Collective Intelligence: shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making.
- Apache Hadoop: An open-source software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license.
- Applications: Clickstream Analytics, Credit Risk Analytics, Anti-Money Laundering, Capturing Store Insights for Timely Engagement, Marketing Campaign Management, Election Campaign Analytics, etc.
Will Happen in 10 Years?
Here’re a few exciting trends in big data:
- Big data in the cloud, Data as a Service
- Enterprise Data Lake
- Deep Learning – Machine Learning
- Data visualization for decision making
- Business Innovation
Q&A
During the final session, Mr. Hui received questions from various perspectives from the audience, and shared his opinions and suggestions as below:
- Have data to support your ideas
- Bring more context to the problem
- Try visualize your suggestions/ideas/argument as much as possible
- Be aware of your company’s data strategy and be supportive
- Innovate
- Build a data driven career
- Recommend the book “Experience Economy”
Big data is coming on strong; it’s a perfect storm event. It estimated by 2020, there could be four times more digital data than all the grains of sand on earth. In the future, data will be the new oil.
NHC thanks Albert sincerely for his time and wonderful presentation. He showed great knowledge of his field, demonstrated great energy in her presentation.
We also appreciate the contribution from our volunteers, and the participation and support from everybody attending our event.