Big Data: New Elixir, New Aether of Life!!

Few days ago one of my friends sent this forwarded joke on WhatsApp:

Me- Hello! Tony’s pizza? 

Google- No it's Google's pizza.

Me- So it's a wrong number? 

Google- No sir, Google bought Tony’s. 

Me- OK. Take my order. 

Google- Well sir, you want the usual? 

Me- The usual?

Google- According to our caller ID, the last 12 times, you ordered pizza with cheeses, sausage, thick crust.

Me- Yes! 

Google- May I suggest to you add ricotta, arugula with tomato? 

Me- No, I hate vegetables 

Google- But your cholesterol is not good

Me- How do you know this?

Google- We have the results of your blood test for the past 7 years 

Me- I already take medication. 

Google- You have not taken medicine recently. 4 months ago you only purchased 30 tablets online

Me- I bought more from another Pharmacy

Google- It's not showing on your credit card

Me- I paid in cash

Google- But you did not withdraw that much cash according to your bank statement

Me- I have another source of cash

Google- According to your Tax files you do not have another source.... unless you did not report it. 

Me- I'm hanging up. 

Google- The pizza is already at the GPS location your are calling from. Have a good day.

I passed it off as a joke at first instance, however after one deep read, I realized, It’s now a reality.

Big data and analytics are the new drivers and growth engines for all the businesses. User data collection and its analysis is a next big revolution and it is going to cause huge disruption, if not done already, in the way businesses are run, grown. 

Every click on Social Media, every search on search engine creates data; adds on to our digital profile and lets someone know about your preferences your interests your likes, your dislikes... just imagine how much data we leave behind. Gone are the days when someone used to leave footprints on the sands of time..... We now leave digiprints!!!! Gone are the days when archaeologists used to trace fossils, today the modern day archaeologists- data scavengers, those Hadoop trained analysts trace your digiprints!!!  

As it stands more than 2.7 zettabytes of data is currently floating around in today’s binary universe, and is expected to exponentially grow to 180 zettabytes in by 2025 (for the uninitiated zettabytes has 21 zeroes on 1 or 10²¹ bytes)

As Mark Cuban calls it; data is new gold, new oil, new plastics...... I would go even beyond and call Big Data the new Elixir, new Ether of life!! 

There are several companies, organizations use, analyze this data to generate insights that can help organizations run, grow their business. Big Data combined with analytics is a potent combination to influence user choices..

There are various data analysis techniques available which help businesses serve, understand customer better. Techniques like: 

• Data Mining
• Data Management
• Text Mining
• Psychographic profiling

are the big levers on which business houses are now spending huge amounts of money and are reaping its rewards.

The world has already seen how the public opinion can be influenced using these techniques:

Cases in point: Last Presidential elections in America- How Donald Trump influenced voters in 2016 US election (and eventually making Cambridge Analytica household name), how Brexit decision was influenced and how Narendra Modi swept the 2014 election in India… The only reason to select these 3 examples is to show the scale and impact of psychologic profiling off Big Data!!! 

I just want to put some chilling facts in front of readers:

Circa-2008. 

Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell; the students of Cambridge University, Psycometrics Centre; introduced an app on Facebook which allowed users to take a quiz to understand and share their own profiles. They got way too many responses, much higher than their expectations. Kosinski correlated the results of the psychographic profiles to the Facebook likes of the respondents…and voila- he was able to make deductions based on these correlations..... This opened the ‘Ocean’ (pun intended) of secrets in front of the world!! (Ocean = 5 personality traits on which psychographic model is based = Openness, Contentiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism)

Having analyzed the data and user profiles and Facebook likes; Kosinksi was able to assess and predict an individual's profile. Just 70 likes by the user and Kosinski knew more about the person than his friends. He could predict the skin color, sexual orientation and political affiliations with greater than 85 percent accuracy. With increasing number of likes, the profiling got even deeper and at 150 likes, he could better predict the person than the parents of the individual.... double the likes to 300 and Kolinski knew better than the partners. More likes, and Kosinski could know more about the person than the person knew about himself... phew!! What can I say.. watch your Likes mate!! Someone’s watching you...err.. profiling you..  (read more at http://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/big-data-and-psychographic-profiling-helped-donald-trump-win-the-us-presidential-election-3696847.html)  

These are not the only areas where big data and analytics play a role…. the range is really vast and varied

1. Hospitality:

• Creating customized guest experience: 

Just imagine after tiresome travel and grueling business meeting, when you check-in into the hotel; your personal favorite welcome drink is served to you by hotel even without you asking it; or as you enter the room you can smell the aroma that too just at the right note- too mild not strong; of your favorite room freshener you will have that relaxing, soothing feeling. When you enter the shower bath and open the faucet you realize that the water temperature is exactly set as you would have liked to!!!!! You would feel as if you are a Sultan of Brunei!!

• Increasing Business Profitability:

Business houses are consuming user data big time. One such case is of Finnair. Using passenger volume, demand data it can model its network, anticipate future passenger flow, predict market share by route, and analyze route-specific and market-specific performance in comparison to competitors. Analytics also helps the company price and market routes and services. (read more at: https://www.sas.com/en_us/customers/finnair.html)

    2. Healthcare:

• Better Predicting Health outcomes:

By analyzing huge volumes of structured and unstructured clinical and operational data; the various analytics tools can uncover hidden insights on indications and then turn that insight into evidence-based knowledge that can help healthcare professionals predict and improve outcomes.

It also helps doctors to make big data-informed decisions within seconds and improve patients’ treatment. This is particularly useful in case of patients with complex medical histories, suffering from multiple conditions.

  3. Retail:

Based on a customer’s purchase history, retailers can predict what the customer is likely to purchase next. Machine learning models are trained in analyzing historical data which allows the retailer to generate accurate recommendations, helps in forecasting trends, Optimizing product pricing.

Predictive data searches on Google, predictive typing are day to day examples of how user data is used for enhancing customer experience. When I first encountered the predictive typing or predictive search- I was clueless, surprised, happy all at the same time.... so naive I was….I didn’t know I had left my own digitrace; every time when I searched something or typed!!! Another recent example is Predictive Email Responses- a feature added by Gmail. It shows the use of data gathered from user responses and utilization of deep machine learning.

As the world gets increasingly Facebooked and Googled and Ubered and Amazoned, we leave more and more data about ourselves in this binary world. The Data Tide, the Data Waves can’t be abated.

Such data waves are making users empowered and vulnerable at the same time. While I am not undermining the huge positive impact already created by Big Data and the promise it holds for future but the current and gradually increasing thereat of Privacy or the lack it poses some serious questions. “Are we Socially secure in this Social Media profiling days” a question of gigantic proportion has been posed to us by Big Data, Data Analytics; very sadly the answer to this question is overwhelmingly No. It’s a classic case of Data, Data everywhere, not a place to hide!!!!

P.S: while I searched for data for this article my digital profiling had been updated. I immediately started to get ads related to Big Data training on Hadoop. Machine learning is an abyss!! machine learning is relentless, tireless and continual process. While you are reading this blog post, data centers located in remote areas have updated your profile and you have opened a new digi-thread for the machines to explore…

Brace yourself for the topsy-turvy Big Data ride in years to come!! A whole new ecosystem, a whole new economy thriving on Big Data, Data Analytics is going to open new vistas to us. Only time will tell how!!!!