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Big Data Analytics is Changing the Face of Manufacturing

October 28, 2016 by glensartain

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The trends of the society keep changing with the passing time and people, businesses who fail to conform to them eventually fail. Data analytics is one such thing which has taken the manufacturing industry by storm and is already being considered by 48 percent of manufacturers as a necessity instead of an option.

Up to 68 percent of manufacturers are ready to invest in it and utilize the results for their betterment of their business. They are stepping in the right direction because the insights on the data will help them in identifying the strengths and weaknesses of their business and work on them. Most of them are even ready to increase the number of investments in this regard.

Big data analytics plays a vital role in helping the organization in harnessing their data for the right motives. They are able to identify new opportunities, attain efficiency and speed, and make the customers happy and profits high. Some of the key takeaways of big data analytics have been discussed below:

Well-informed, quick decisions because of greater insight on the data

Having the ability to analyze new sources of data combined with speed and in-memory analytics, the business are able to work on any piece of information in a relatively less amount of team. Their learning enables them to take decisions immediately and work on them without any delay. It also helps in a quick and easy prediction of problems and coming up with the strategy to cater the workload in the best possible way.

Devising future strategies and determining the correct direction for their employees

There are 50 percent of business owners who truly believe that data analytics enables them to stay on the right path. They are confident that the predictive analysis is making them reach the goals in the most effective way. The employees are guided in the right direction to generate more profits for the company and also attain ultimate customer satisfaction.

Reduced costs and increased profits

One of the biggest perks of big data analytics is that it provides the right direction for the company while reducing the overall costs. The chances of risk are mitigated which ensures that the company keeps generating more profit and all the strategies are designed while spending the fraction of a cost which otherwise goes in forming the agenda of a company.

Innovative ideas and new products and services

The analysis of the data leads to the determination of the demands of the general public. This, in turn, gives rise to innovative ideas which are directed to satisfy the growing needs of the customers. The company will reach a level of saturation if it doesn’t keep introducing new products and services for its clients. The same applies to the manufacturing sector which needs to enhance their scope to maintain a reasonable standing in the market.

The incorporation of these benefits make big data analytics a must for every manufacturing business and open doors for its growth and development.

Filed Under: Big Data, Consulting Tagged With: big data, business, data analytics, data science, data scientist, industry, informtation, job, manufacturing

Big Data And Analytics Helped Olympic Athletes Train For Rio 2016

September 12, 2016 by glensartain

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Athletes are always working to improve, and big data could be the next catalyst in the development of training techniques for the 2016 Rio Olympics. Coaches and athletes alike have been working with analytics and big data to gain the highest amount of insight possible. This is especially true in the highest levels of each sport, so naturally big data is used in the training for the Olympic Games. There is a lot of pressure on Olympic athletes to use the newest analytics technology.

 

The British Olympic rowing team certainly feelt this pressure. They are the only team from Great Britain that has won the gold medal in every Olympics since 1984, and they definitely wanted to keep it up. (In case you didn’t follow the Olympics this year, Britian’s men’s coxless four and men’s coxed eight both took gold in Rio, as did women’s coxless pair.) They have been utilizing the most advanced data-driven analytics with the goal of making their boats go faster.

 

Rowing is, in some ways, automatically compatible with analytics. The majority of what the athletes do can be measured. Whether it’s a session in the gym or on-water training, the data will most likely be quite similar to the actual performance. However, there are also a few challenges in using analytics for rowing. For example, rowing occurs outside where weather and water conditions are unpredictable.

 

Sir David Tanner who has led both the Olympic and Paralympics rowing program since 1996, is a large part of the analytics process. Two of the most important uses of the analytics are in the identification and and tracking of talent. While both of these aspects are important, talent tracking is the most crucial. After every possible bit of data is collected about each athlete who enters the training program, the profiles of new entrants can be compared to those of former entrants in order to figure out which approach will set each individual up for success.

 

Just like a number of businesses, sports teams are seeing that positive results will likely be generated by a holistic approach to data management and strategy. Sir David Tanner feels that longitudinal profiling of athletes, as well as biomechanics and exercise physiology are the fields with the most potential.

 

Another common thread between the methods of sports teams and businesses is the importance of partnership. Most people in the field of elite sports science and physiology are not well-versed in the technical skills necessary to create a Big Data-driven analytics system. Great Britain’s rowing team has worked alongside several tech partners such as Siemens and SAS to implement an analytical framework. Collaboration is also occurring on the managerial level, where the data strategy is planned.

 

Rowing requires a balance of strength and endurance. As a result, conflicts can arise in training practices. Endurance training can work counter-actively to strength training, and vice versa. This challenge can be combated using large amounts of past performance data, which can show what gains a certain rower will most likely make after being trained using a particular regime.

Another positive effect of this system is the decrease in injuries. The analytics system is able to highlight warning signs and match them against past data to indicate when an athlete is at risk of pushing themselves too hard. Analytics and Big Data are playing a significant role in the training of Great Britain’s rowing team, and they showed that it can make a big impact with this legendary team’s performance at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio.

 

Filed Under: Big Data Tagged With: big data, data analytics, data science, data scientist, olympics, rio 2016, rowing

How Big Data Unlocked the Panama Papers

April 6, 2016 by glensartain

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If you don’t know about the Panama Papers by now, you should. Here’s the scoop: an anonymous source, over a year ago, leaked 2.6 terabytes of data to German news source Süddeutsche Zeitung. This data was encrypted internal documents from Mossack Fonesca, which is a law firm in Panama, which is selling offshore companies located all over the world.

 

As a quick aside I would like to break down what these documents are outlining and what  offshore banking and the buying of shell companies means: Mossack Fonesca appear to have been selling shell companies to wealthy individuals and companies worldwide to act as a tax-free money trove. Essentially, any person or company that hold their profits in the bank legally gets taxed on those profits by their respective governments. The longer you hold those profits the more you may have to pay in taxes. But investing that money into areas such as R&D, acquiring smaller companies, or expanding a business are all tax free ways for a business to use profits. With an offshore shell company, anyone could invest or buy into a fake business that looks like investment. The fake company, brokered by a law firm, can then “pay back” the investment at a later time. Until that time, the money can be held offshore with no taxes to be paid. You can also hide how much money you are actually making by holding offshore before claiming it as your income.

 

So this leak of data to the news source turned out to be 11.5 million files of “… emails, contracts, transcriptions and scanned documents. In total, the leak contains: 4.8 million emails, three million database entries, two million PDFs, one million images and 320,000 text documents. The dataset is bigger than any from Wikileaks, or the Edward Snowden disclosures.” According to Wired.

 

This incredible amount of data does not necessarily detail illegal behavior, but does shine a light on the potential criminal activity, barely-legal activity, or shady dealings of wealthy people and companies all over the world, as The New York Times explains, it’s “not illegal in many cases to have offshore bank accounts. But they are used in some instances by wealthy individuals and criminals to hide money and business transactions, and to avoid paying taxes.” And among those named in the papers are more than 70 current or former world leaders, in addition to people like friends of Vladimir Putin, relatives of leadership in China, Britain, and Pakistan, the President of Ukraine, and Iceland’s (former) Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson, who is resigning as of Tuesday, April 5th, 2015. He is just the first casualty of the Panama Papers, and many more may be on the way.

 

But what I want to talk about is not the Panama Papers highlighting how global and how severe the world’s tax-evasion problems are, what is really interesting is how we got the information out of 11.5 million documents and over 2.6 terabytes of data. Hailed as the biggest data leak in journalistic history, just how exactly did Süddeutsche Zeitung find anything useful in a literal sea of documentation? Big data analytics is the answer. As a journalist pounding the streets and knocking on doors for information, that is an unthinkably large amount of information, but to Nuix, an Australian data analytics system in Australia, 2.6 terrabytes is not that far out of the norm. It took them just about two weeks to turn everything: emails, PDF’s, Word documents and PowerPoint presentations into a database that could be queried.

 

Once you have a database it just takes some deep querying to draw correlations and spot patterns. According to TechWorld: “The system churns through the files at high speed, extracting text as well as the metadata that indicates who created each file, when the file was created and notes subsequent modifications. Sometimes the location is available. The language doesn’t matter to Nuix, which can process characters and words in any language using natural language processing (NLP). Documents in a closed state such as PDFs are identified and fed into an optical character recognition (OCR)  system for text extraction, something that accounts for most of the work according to Barron. Critically, Nuix de-duplicates the data – the same file in a different place – which in the case of the Panama Papers quickly removed about a third of the data.”

 

So instead of thumbing through paper looking for a dignitary’s name in 11.5 million different sheets of paper, with big data analytics you can start to cross-reference and use simple search terms. In addition to indexing the data and sorting it in different ways, like credit card numbers or company names, the software itself can seek out repeating terms, like a name that occurs in multiple places many times, and flag it as recognized in other places. This can help human analysts and journalists quickly shake out the chaff and leave the juicy information sitting right where you can see it. “The data from the Panama Papers shows that Mossack Fonseca worked with more than 14,000 banks, law firms, company incorporators and other middlemen to set up companies, foundations and trusts for customers,” the ICIJ says.

 

Long term, big data analytics isn’t just useful for companies who want to dissect customer’s habits to sell more to them. It also makes impenetrable amounts of information penetrable, and in cases like the Panama Papers, it is going to unlock the hidden patterns and help make correlations that can be a dangerous thing for secrets. Eventually, there won’t be any place to hide.

 

Filed Under: Big Data Tagged With: big data, business, data analytics, data science, data scientist, panama papers

Want to be a Data Scientist?

March 8, 2016 by glensartain

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It’s an in-demand position, with fewer qualified people in the job market than in other sectors of tech. Job posting/reviewing site Glassdoor named it the number one job in the United States with a base salary starting at just over six figures.

 

Why is this job such a valuable position? This is due to the “big data” trend. It entails sifting through the mountains of information that we produce every moment of our online lives. For example, years ago, OkCupid, the online dating service, was sifting through data, and when they laid the number of users logged in over the weather patterns of a region, they noticed a huge jump in activity from users in a city every time that city got rain. Now, when they pull a local weather report into the system, they automatically send out an email to the users in the city to let them know this rainstorm is the best time to meet someone else who will be online the same time as you. That’s big data. It is as important for Wall Street as it is for the Centers for Disease Control as it is for a clothing store trying to get their advertising to the person that is most likely to want to buy from them.

 

But it takes a lot of digging through endless amounts of numbers and comparing it to an endless number of factors to make sense of the information. So it’s no surprise to anyone that there would be a plethora of educational institutions from online programs to Ivy League universities that are offering curriculum in data science. These can be very expensive programs.

 

Enter Databricks,  a startup tech company that is currently one of the biggest names in “big data” science. They are soon to roll out a new program that allows students a free version of their data cloud service called the “Community Edition.” They are currently accepting applications for the wait list, where students and others will have access to a micro-cluster as well as a cluster manager and notebook environment. They will also have access to Spark training resources. Spark is the name of the Databricks technology they developed while the founders were professors at UC Berkeley.

 

A year ago Databricks unveiled a free online course to train people in a data science using Spark, and the demand went through the roof. 20,000 or so people have completed the course and over 76,000 people have enrolled in it. “We wanted to double down on this. We thought, how can we teach more people, teach 100,000 people how do data science? That’s what we’ve been working on for six months, this version of Databricks,” CEO Ali Ghodsi said.
If you are interested in teaching yourself Spark, in adding to your developer, engineer, or IT portfolio, I highly recommend you read more about Databricks and consider signing yourself up for the waitlist!

Filed Under: Big Data Tagged With: big data, data analytics, data science, data scientist, databricks, job, spark

Start With WHY

October 14, 2014 by glensartain

IT-computer-hand

Nothing that I’m going to write about is my original concept. I’m not a creative person, however I’m extremely re-creative. It’s easy for me to take a concept that I’ve learned from someone else and apply it to the current environment. Having said that, the majority of the concepts discussed in this thesis, come from a book by @SimonSinek entitled “Start With Why.” (I highly encourage you to download the book and read it in it’s entirety for an in depth understanding of all the concepts. For a shorter version there is also a video recorded TEDTalk available here.) In essence, I’ve taken the concepts Sinek talks about in his book, and have applied them to technology, companies and the world as we know it.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Consulting Tagged With: business, consulting, informtation

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