On Wednesday, October 19th, SciFY organized the first seminar for the new year on Big Data at the INNOVATHENS Innovation and Entrepreneurship Hub of the Technopolis City of Athens. Over 120 people watched as Dr. Konstantinos Tsakalozos and Dr. George Giannakopoulos introduced us to the field of Big Data.
Initially, the event was opened by Mr. Vassilis Giannakopoulos, SciFY’s marketing director, who presented SciFY’s free and open-source assistive technology platform, Talk and Play, for people with disabilities. This original system has been developed with the exclusive donation of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. It enables our fellow human beings who have both mobility and speech difficulties to communicate, listen to music, watch movies, and play games that strengthen their skills, thereby hastening their rehabilitation.
Then, Dr. Konstantinos Tsakalozos took the floor. After discussing the origins of big data, he emphasized the reasons why someone would work with big data. As a business grows, the data it uses increases, and it becomes easy to accumulate a large amount of data. Conventional processing methods, however, do not apply to this type and size of data. Thus, businesses must leverage big data technology to efficiently process their ever-increasing data, generating insights that lead to improved operations.
There are solutions (Big Data Software) that are often complex. They require staff training and are not particularly user-friendly. As Mr. Tsakalozos told us, essentially, what they need is a reduction in their operating costs, along with the modeling and implementation of the necessary solutions.
Canonical’s Juju platform was introduced. The said platform is an ecosystem that provides the ability to set up infrastructures, including big data management systems, easily. In Juju, you can implement applications (charms) in any language (Puppet, Ansible, Bash, Python, Java), use applications implemented by others through a rich collection, and collaborate with other providers through the community.
Then, Dr. George Giannakopoulos discussed the application of big data in various fields, including social media, bioinformatics, and wind turbine maintenance. He emphasized that big data is not just “a lot” of data, meaning its volume is not its only characteristic. Data characteristics indicative of a “big data” problem are also the speed of data change, the variety of forms and ways it occurs, the ability to verify the data, and the value generated from it (enabling action). He touched upon the Big Data Europe Program [1], an international project funded by the EU, which brings together 16 organizations from 10 European countries in a collaboration for the future of “big data” in Europe. The 7 project development pilots are aligned with the societal challenges of the Horizon 2020 funding framework [2] and, more specifically, are 1) Pharmacology, 2) Oenology, 3) Energy (wind turbines), 4) Assessment of traffic conditions, 5) Climate, 6) Social Sciences, and 7) Secure Societies.
Sources:
[2]http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/h2020-section/societal-challenges
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