Hello, Big Algorithms

January 15, 2016

The year had barely started and it looks lime we already have a new buzzword to nestle into our ears: big algorithms.  The term algorithm has been tossed around with big data as one of the driving forces behind powerful analytics.  Big data is an encompassing term that refers to privacy, security, search, analytics, organization, and more.  The real power, however, lies in the algorithms.  Benchtec posted the article, “Forget Big Data-It’s Time For Big Algorithms” to explain how algorithms are stealing the scene.

Data is useless unless you are able to are pull something out of it.  The only way get the meat off the bone is to use algorithms.  Algorithms might be the powerhouses behind big data, but they are not unique.  The individual data belonging to different companies.

“However, not everyone agrees that we’ve entered some kind of age of the algorithm.  Today competitive advantage is built on data, not algorithms or technology.  The same ideas and tools that are available to, say, Google are freely available to everyone via open source projects like Hadoop or Google’s own TensorFlow…infrastructure can be rented by the minute, and rather inexpensively, by any company in the world. But there is one difference.  Google’s data is theirs alone.”

Algorithms are ingrained in our daily lives from the apps run on smartphones to how retailers gather consumer detail.  Algorithms are a massive untapped market the article says.  One algorithm can be manipulated and implemented for different fields.  The article, however, ends on some socially conscious message about using algorithms for good not evil.  It is a good sentiment, but kind of forced here, but it does spur some thoughts about how algorithms can be used to study issues related to global epidemics, war, disease, food shortages, and the environment.

Whitney Grace, January 15, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph

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