If you listen to the techiest of the tech people these days, you’ll often catch the phrase ‘big data.’ And right off the bat, it sounds a bit imposing. Two simple words put together that could mean – just about anything!
But if you’re planning on getting into the information technology field, regardless of your umbrella industry, you should probably learn the term too, and how to use it properly. Follow these steps to get your feet shuffling into the deep water of big data, including looking for companies already involved in the process, thinking about things like facial recognition and voice analysis, reading updates as often as possible, and keeping a close eye on privacy concerns.
Look For Companies Already Involved
When you look for companies already involved in analyzing big data and doing things like using predictive analytics, you’ll see where some of the excitement comes from regarding the concept. It takes massive amounts of computational power to work with the analytics that are going on from all of the input in various systems, but when it’s all pieced together, the results are absolutely astounding.
Consider Facial Recognition Software
Think about what kind of power it takes to run facial recognition software. Pixel by pixel, some computer program has to decipher what makes a face, and then has to compare it to an infinite number of possibilities that may be the same face, but under different lighting conditions, or at a different angle, or aged 15 years. And new, big data systems can do this, almost instantly. And those systems can even track faces moving, in video for instance.
Look into Voice Analysis Programs
Voice analysis programs go through similar fantastic amounts of information. When you look at speech-to-text software programs, it’s almost impossible to wrap your head around what kind of crazy programming and processing power it takes to do this kind of work. And then think that iPhone’s have capabilities using Siri technology, and Google Documents has new online text-to-speech conversions that work with a simple push of a button.
Read News Updates Regularly
To keep up with what’s going on in the big data realm, just typing in the search string and seeing what kind of news pops up in your feed is going to be one of the best ways to keep up to the minute on popular knowledge of the subject.
Know that Privacy is a Concern
One of the common issues that people have with the idea of gathering big data in the first place is that it’s difficult to understand just how hard it is to protect that information. How much information gathered is truly secure? Who can access it? If there’s so much that a normal person can’t process it feasibly, then how can human security measure keep up? These are big questions for a new age!