Big Data: The New Oil of the Digital Economy
Posted by Prof. Kapil Gautam, Department of Information Technology 15 January 2017 As someone who has been teaching Information Technology for over fifteen years in engineering colleges in Delhi, I’ve always told my students that the real excitement in our field comes when technology suddenly makes sense of something that used to be completely unmanageable. That’s exactly how I feel about Big Data right now in early 2017. A few years ago, we used to talk about data in megabytes and gigabytes. Today, the world is generating data at a scale that was almost unimaginable even in 2010. Every minute, millions of posts go up on Facebook and Twitter, sensors in factories and cities keep sending readings, and online transactions happen by the second. This explosion of data — in volume, velocity and variety — is what we now call Big Data. The term itself isn’t brand new, but in the last couple of years it has moved from being a buzzword to a practical reality that every engineer needs ...