Assignment - 2 AIT580

Shravan Chintha
G01064991
Big Data:
Big data analytics is all about studying very large and complex data sets that can be analyzed
to computationally to identify patterns, trends and correlations that can improve the business
further. As an effective strategy, the overall plan of any analytics to increase the revenue of a
business is to understand the data clearly. But additional questions arise about how much
data is needed, what type of data is needed and what are the timelines in which it needs to
be analyzed. All these questions are nothing but about Volume, Variety and Velocity of the
data. Thus, defining the 3Vs can help answering the above questions and thereby providing
clarity on how a person can implement them in an organization. Defining these big data
characteristics in some of the use cases mentioned below:
Social Media
Medicine and Health
Scientific Research
Sales / Marketing
Politics

1. Social Media:
Applying analytics on Social media data, big data applications in various industries go beyond
the functioning of interactions to see how the content present in the interactions would affect
the business and peoples opinion about the brand image of the company. Content analytics
allows companies to identify and track actionable information from the messages that users
post. For example, analytics can be programmed such that it can track positive or negative
sentiment about a brand as that could threaten the reputation and business of the company.
If we take Twitter as an example of Social media use case, the big data characteristics of
twitter can be defined as:
Volume:
Volume refers to the number of units of data that is shared and how much data is been
shared. In twitter, the units may refer to the number of tweets that are made. Daily millions
of tweets will be made all over the world, this generates large and large chunks of data in
terms of size of the data. The volume here depends on the number of tweets made. All these
tweets that are to be analyzed contributes to the volume of the big data. On an average
Twitter produces 12 times more data each day than New York Stock exchange as per a source.
It means that for twitter data to be analyzed, volume is one of the key factors that is to be
considered.
Variety:
The variety of big data in social media context refers to the kind of data that has been shared
by the users. In twitter, it may refer to the tweets, or comments or shares of an image or
audio clip or video clip or check-in or GPS location or combination of any of these. Also, the
data is shared in any other social media like Facebook or Google Plus or You Tube or more
than one place.
Velocity:
Velocity in social media context refer to real time data or near-real time data or onetime event
or repeated event or the data shared is in batch or standalone. All these contribute to velocity
of the data. In Twitter, the speed with which number of tweets are made is considered in
terms of velocity.

2. Medicine and Health:

Majorly big data analytics are applied in the field of Medicine and health to know the trends
in consumers behavior or response to the drugs and treatment given to the various diseases.
Based on their response and trends, new drugs will be designed and tested in this perspective
such that their business would grow in the market. One such company is eCare21.
eCare21(remote patient monitoring system) is a mobile health application that collects,
compares and analyzes real-time information about users health and wellness.
Volume:
Many hundreds of records that are collected needs to be stored in database. This application
uses smartphones, fitbits, Bluetooth, mobile apps and other sensors to collect data about
things like physical activity, blood glucose levels, blood pressure, body weight and medication
intake. All these information is stored and displayed onto dashboards of the application for
the user.
Variety:
eCare21 integrates the efforts of families, doctors, volunteers, businesses etc to build a care
model that is suitable for everyone. In the process, the application integrates all the type of
data that comes from different sources such as wearables, medical devices, electronic records
and other healthcare management type of data.
Velocity:
eCare21 collects thousands of records of health information about 1000 senior citizens for
every minute. All these data is integrated into a single dashboard after analyzing. The analysts
need to analyze this data as soon as it is recorded and apply few algorithms that would
provide data into dashboards in a better or understandable way to the end user. The speed
with which data is recorded denotes the velocity aspect of big data.
3. Scientific Research:
A key example of big data company in Scientific research is Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron
(DESY). DESY is a leading scientific organization in Germany which provides scientists all over
the world with faster access to insights into the atomic structure of novel semiconductors,
catalysts, bio cells and other samples, making optimal data management in an extremely
critical environment. The characteristics of big data in DESY are defined as below:
Volume:
High volumes of X-ray data is produced by detectors in short time. DESY employs software
defined storage capabilities to tackle its analytics challenge. With data generated by various
sensors and detectors, a lot of data gets generated which needs to be stored. As high volumes
are generated Volume of big data is a challenge in this industry.
Variety:
Data is been collected from a variety of source which generates data in different types. The
data that is collected is unstructured, heterogeneous, nonlinear, non-steady and other high
dimensional type of data. All the types of data needs to be integrated before analyzing.
Velocity:
With the amount of data thats get generated per second in DESY makes it a difficult challenge
for the company. An accelerator, PETRA III Accelerator, is used in data storage and
management system which generates about 20GB data per second. This is very large amount
of data that is being generated in very less time making it difficult to analyze for analysts.

4. Sales/Marketing:
There are multiple factors involved in increasing the revenue from marketing or sales using
big data analytics. An example of such company is Salesforce. Salesforce is a cloud computing
company which develops customer management tools that provides business solution to
marketing and sales of their customers. The characteristics in Sales force are defined below:
Volume:
A number of records created and stored in the form of Leads, Opportunities, Deals in Sales
module of the business solution. All these records are needed to be analyzed before taking a
decision and moving forward with the decision. Sales force online manages all the data that
is been created by its users across the world. They analyze this data and develops changes
that could improve the business solution.
Variety:
Whenever a Lead or Opportunity is created, it can be associated with file attached. Those files
can be of any document form like word, pdf, media file etc. All the data is to be segregated
before analyzing. All these kinds of data present in the different records created adds variety
in the big data analytics.
Velocity:
Thousands of Opportunities, Leads are getting created every day as the number of users for
Salesforce is very high. All the data collected is to be analyzed soon in order to take any
business decisions.

5. Politics:
The ICO, Information Commissioners Office, is a political investigation company which
started investigation on political use private data specifically related to the big data
analytics used in Brexit referendum. The characteristics of this political data collected by
ICO:

Volume:
Data is collected from various sources including from social media data. The data collected
is used to infer an individuals political learnings and thereby used this data to created
target advertising campaigns. As a process, large amount of data is been collected on daily
basis. All the data is stored and analyzed before making a decision on creating an
advertising campaign

Variety:
As the data collected is from multiple sources, it included many different types of data.
Data is been collected such as Demographics, Occupation, political and charitable
contribution history, memberships, permits and licenses, magazine subscriptions etc., all
these type of data forms variety a challenge in big data analytics.

Velocity:
As the political advertising campaigns are held on a daily basis, surveys are conducted in
the same campaigns and data collected from these surveys are analyzed as soon as possible
to make additions to the ongoing campaigns and making the events successful.

References:

1. Taylor and Francis, Copyright issues, retrieved from

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17538947.2015.1015942?src=recsys&
journalCode=tjde20
2. Web page, copyright 2017,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2016/05/05/the-best-big-data-and-
business-analytics-companies-to-work-for-in-2016/#1ef311bd427c
3. Web page,
http://www.bigdatalandscape.com/blog/big-data-sales-must-know-companies
4. Web page, Copy rights 2017 Salesforce.com
https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2016/06/businesses-use-data-analytics-improve-
sales.html
5. Bernie Spang, Vice President, IBM
https://www.scientificcomputing.com/blog/2014/09/scientific-research-and-big-
data-it-starts-storage
6. Meta S.Brown, Article
https://www.forbes.com/sites/metabrown/2016/05/29/big-data-analytics-and-the-
next-president-how-microtargeting-drives-todays-campaigns/#84e96796c428
7. Nicky Capella, CloserStill Media Ltd 2014-2017, All Rights Reserved
https://thestack.com/big-data/2017/05/18/ico-investigating-big-data-analytics-in-
politics/
8. H.O.Maycotte, Forbes, Copy rights reserved @ 2017
https://www.forbes.com/sites/homaycotte/2015/05/12/will-big-data-determine-our-
next-president/#36c870b44738