Stan Matwin was a keynote speaker at the 2014 Desigining Productivity Conference organized by the Department of Industrial Engineering at Dalhousie. Amongst other activities, the conference discussed the OneNS/Ivany Report with commission member and Nova Scotia business leader Irene d’Entremont and other notable business leaders and strategic thinkers including, Bill Black and JP Deveau (President of Acadian Seaplants ltd.). The agenda also included speakers from the Barrington Consulting Group Inc., Scotsburn Dairy Group.
And, in May 29-30 Stan participated in the ERCIM Expert Group on Big Data Analytics in Tirenia, Italy. The objective of this Expert Group is to gather experts on the many faces of Big Data Analytics and compile with their help a white paper that fosters a future agenda for European research on this direction.
Sensing big data at a societal scale, and the transparent interlinking of digital and physical reality, has the potential of providing a powerful social microscope, which can help us understand many complex and hidden socio-economic phenomena, such as mobility behaviors, economic and financial crises, the spread of epidemics, the diffusion of opinions and so on. It is clear that such challenge requires high-level analytics, modeling and reasoning across all the social dimensions.
In practice, however, there is a big gap from the opportunities offered by the big data to the challenges posed by social, economical, scientific phenomena: Big data are fragmented and low-level. They reside in diverse databases and repositories, often inaccessible for proprietary and legal constraints, and have limited power to portray different social dimensions. There are many regulatory, business and technological barriers to set the power of big data free.
As a response, the paradigm of Big Data Analytics is emerging at the convergence of several disciplines, including machine learning, data mining, statistics, complex systems, socioeconomic sciences, etc. There is a flourishing body of research about making sense of Big Data, but a coherent scientific and technological framework is still missing. We need to put at work scientists and technologists from different disciplines to shape a research and innovation agenda that might drive the ERICM future actions.
The ERCIM group involves prominent research leaders in industry and academia to share their visions and elaborate together what should be the challenging research issues in this promising research frontier.