As you know, one of my pet projects is to help out the AI community grow. In addition to the vendor neutral community we’ve launched a while ago, Carlos and I have been actively engaged with the Rules Fest organization. If you have not yet had a chance to check it, it is a technical conference with practical advice for practitioners of all reasoning technologies. I am very pleased that the conference will host another speaker on Big Data. for the past 2 years, Carlos presented on that very topic (Rules Fest 2009 presentation and Rules Fest 2010 presentation) so we are naturally very excited to see the momentum growing!
I wanted to share a few thoughts on why we are so excited about it.
Why is Big Data important for Decision Management?
In a way I feel a couple of decade younger, thinking about the impact Business Intelligence had on our systems and more importantly on Decision Making. Data-warehousing became a top priority for CIOs to uncover golden information lying in historical transactions. Unfortunately those techniques and technologies required a major investment that could not always be justified. The Cloud is changing those dynamics by making it easy to tap into gold mines that are made readily available by most Cloud services.
Well beyond the transactional activity you could capture over time, Big Data is making an incredible wealth of information if you get permission to tap into it. Social software not only reports on the individual’s transactions but it also retrieves information on his or her friends’s behavior. In no time, you can get plenty of data that could be relevant for your decision-making processes. Assuming that good people frequent good people and fraudsters frequent fraudsters, you could get the additional insight you might need to pick the good apples out of the bag in the absence of long and rich history.
Why is Big Data important for Reasoning Technologies?
My post on the Summer of AI may give away some hints….