Discuss your professional objectives both short and long term. What has motivated you to apply to this program? Back in 2007, I got my first exposure to Big Data while working for a now defunct startup company, called Memedia, to design and build their online ad distribution system. There, I saw firsthand the importance of the data being collected about internet users in helping the company target ads for online advertisers to the right audience through their partner publishers. At the time, Facebook was not the behemoth that it is today and companies were timid about collecting consumers’ personal information. But as we know today, the public has become very tolerant and has allowed social media companies to be more intrusive with …show more content…
After working for five years in the engineering field, I was fortunate enough to be able to transition to a software developer position at a financial institution in the mid 1980’s. I have since become a well-seasoned professional in the software development field and participated in many projects where I was able create useful tools for various businesses and organizations and their users. My drive to remain creative has not diminished over the years and with the same enthusiasm of those early years, I am today fascinated with the Big Data phenomenon. I see the opportunity to tackle this new field with the same enthusiasm and creativity I have always strived for. The truth is in the data: I am also motivated by the prospect of the new discoveries that are now possible by exploring Big Data. By looking more closely at the data that is littered around us, researchers are uncovering new answers every day to questions that for years have remained enigmatic and evasive to us. For instance, it was recently confirmed by a study[2] that after Americans started using iodized salt in their diet in the mid 1920’s, people in the US have developed higher IQ compared to some other parts of the world where the product is not in use. This discovery was made possible by looking into data collected from World War II recruits, comparing the IQ test results
So many users of the internet blindly browse and post on these sites without any thought to the online identity they are creating for themselves. Shares, tweets, hashtags, likes, and comments all combine to make up an amalgamation of marketable information. In November of 2016, an average of six thousand tweets were made per second, and ninety-five million Instagram posts were made per day (Sayce; Parker). Facebook “has become the largest database of personal information ever collected,” says Richard, and Facebook takes advantage of this. With almost two billion users, Facebook has no shortage of information to gather (Sparks). They do this mainly for targeted advertising. There is no small profit to be made in this. In 2011 Lori Andrews wrote, “Facebook made $3.2 billion in advertising revenue last year, 85% of it's total revenue.” However, Facebook and other internet corporations also relay data gathered on users to the
Brown, B., Chiu, M., Manyika, J. (2011), Are you ready for the era of big data? Retrieved
1. Describe why you are applying to this program, what your goals are, and how your professional and educational experiences have prepared you for this program.
Big data describes large scale data sets which are analyzed, using algorithms, to determine and eventually predict patterns in human behavior, interactions and the environment (oed.com). Big data is used by government entities to protect against terrorism as well as commercial entities for marketing. Big data needs ethical standards to prevent violations of four central principles, which are privacy, confidentiality, transparency, and identity (Richards 395). Big data is awareness and empowers those who control it. This revolution in information enables companies to shape consumer identity by influencing every interaction the user has with their service. Due to its predictive and persuasive nature, restrictions are necessary for consumers to
Derek Powazek, a published author and pioneer of the Internet, once claimed that “If you're not paying for the product, you are the product”. With social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter having an estimate of 2.3 billion active users, the statement remains true today, seen through the rise of social networking sites monetizing user information and turning this to big data. The application of these available statistics allow for various trends to pick up so easily and quickly in the consumer culture. In a world where social networking sites dominate the market, tons of channels emerge as tools for advertisers to capitalize on an individual’s social clout and circle. The invention of this technology has changed the landscape
Big data and analytics are hot growth areas, not only for IT organizations, but for businesses across all industries.
Not only the development of Big Data brings big opportunities, but it also brings big
In social media every user actively produces data, either by Googling, by sharing tweets, comments, profiles, favorites, likes or follows, or by uploading or downloading blogs, photos, videos or such other content. The amount of information that gets into the Internet is unimaginable large and predicted to double every 18 months. Every single action on the social media produces added value, which can be aggregated and capitalized in commercial advertising and market analysis. This is how companies such as Google and Facebook have been able to become multibillion-dollar businesses.
A very simplified way of looking at big data refers to, “the sheer mass of data produced daily by and within global computer networks at a pace that far exceeds the capacity of current databases and software programs to organize and process” (Dewey, "Big Data"). The world of big data has evolved primarily from the business intelligence and analytics field of information technology. Big data and big data analytics involve big data sets. The information that is stored requires unique ways of holding and organizing the data in order to process it correctly. Common methods of data storage are just not possible. The internet has added to the amount of data that can be captured. With the ability of advertisers to utilize technologies to capture user information through web interfaces, the sheer magnitude of information that can be kept is staggering. All of this information can be put to use by any number of businesses and governments (Chen, Chiang, and Storey, "Business Intelligence and Analytics: From Big Data to Big Impact."). The ability to direct or channel all of that information opens unbelievable doors to virtually any organization. All kinds of organizations would benefit including businesses, governments, schools and hospitals (Dewey, "Big Data"). “Big data may be as important to business –
Big data is an extremely important topic for future developments, growth trends and similarities between certain things. From a Microsoft blog published in 2013 big data is “the process of applying serious computing power” (HowieT, 2013). Another article describes big data as data that “exceeds the processing capacity of conventional database systems” (Dumbill, 2012). Based on these definitions and many more alike, big data refers to or can be described as recorded information that exceeds capacity. As brief as this is, data can be recorded using many instruments and even through observation. This topic is interesting to research and develop as new technologies are more capable at storing and reading mass data. With technology advancements, a method that took half a day, more than ten years ago, would only take a couple of minutes using present technologies. As big data is getting more widely used more businesses and enterprises will be interested in the trends shown.
How do you anticipate the program helping you in your current position, and what will be your ambitions/goals once you complete our program?
Today’s Internet companies such as Facebook, Amazon and Google collect and analyze vast volumes of data in real-time to trigger advertising to their users’ pages.
Nowadays, consumers may be more “powerful” than ever, but technology also offers vast benefits for marketers. Cheaper exposure and direct interaction with audiences are two important developments, but it is the rise of Big Data that is perhaps the most revolutionary advancement. The ability to dissect vast amounts of information and reach relevant conclusions suggests that Big Data offers detailed consumer profiling and behaviour insights, (Taparia, 2014) thus leading to a better understanding of consumer preferences and enhanced decision-making by marketers (Lohr, 2011).
The analyzation of data—or the observation of information—has never been an uncommon occurrence; these analyses have grown exponentially since the rise of technology in the 21st century. The results produced through big data analysis have the potential to be paradigm-altering; the implications run much deeper than simply connecting x to y. Although its foundations have been interwoven into society, big data has only recently become a commonly known term. Still, very few are well versed in the subject. What exactly is big data? Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford put it in the simplest terms when they define it as, “very large data sets and the tools and procedures used to manipulate and analyze them” (Boyd and Crawford). This manipulation is vital to many large corporations as they attempt to harness the data in order to personalize the consumer experience in their business techniques. Since its inception, big data has warranted a moral investigation: ethicists have been scrambling to determine how this alien method of marketing should be dealt with. There have been the supporters of big data use, while there have also been those who disapprove,vehemently denouncing even the idea of such a thing. In this paper, big data will be described exactly, including the way it is projected to affect the marketing world, and how utilitarianism should be applied to the moral dilemma in order to reach a satisfactory resolution on the topic.
Many large companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix are leveraging unstructured data to facilitate human decision making, automate simple tasks, and to make the world a smarter place. The term big data is used to describe these unstructured datasets that are so large and complex that traditional