April 06, 2013: Every day, the world creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is ‘Big data’.
Realising the complexity and importance of the data. Jaipuria Indore organised a National Seminar on Managing Big Data – Challenges and Opportunities on April 6. The seminar was well attended by some of the eminent speakers from industry and academic. Some of it them Mr.Vishal Dakoliya, National Head Business Development, Web dunia.com (India) Pvt, Abhishek Sanghvi, MD, ILead,  Prof. K.R. Pardasani, M.A.N.I.T.
Addressing the industry experts and students, director of the institute, Dr. J.P. Upadhyay marked this April as ‘BIG April’ since all of us are growing together with the sharing of knowledge and information. He also shared thatover a period of time, the capacity of Information technology has increased to an enormous level, which is indeed a result of growing IT professionals and IT architecture. He said data has grown vast; we can’t come to an accurate conclusion until and unless we have not gathered, analysed and interpreted the complete data. Sharing his experience, he said that today’s business organizations are crowded by huge amount of data, and to manage that data, is of critical importance, which is where IT plays a major role. He stated objective of the event is to create awareness and educate about the anatomy and physiology of BIG data available and its relevance to business organization. He quoted “The big data needs a big judgement”. To have an appropriate analysis and accurate judgement is a challenge he foresees while dealing with Big Data. He also questioned about the sustainability of present IT scenario as we are losing human intuitive ability, since all decisions are based entirely on data.
Unfolding the big data, Prof.Nitin Merh and Prof.Jagdish Bhagwat said that the data has grown to a capacity of petabytes and zettabytes. Adding on they said big data is not just confined to IT discipline; it has got its implication in every domain across the globe. Limitation of big data analysis and interpretation is that it is based on the principle that future is that extrapolation of the past, which is myopic.
To demystify whether the Big Data is really that big a deal, or, as many people say, correctly, that it is nothing new except for the focus now being broadened to almost all sectors, there were guest speakers who shared their expertise and knowledge on “managing big data- challenges and opportunities”
Mr.Abhishek Sanghvi, Managing Director, ILEADS, focussed on data with respect to qualitative and quantitative dimensions.He said in any business organization, Big Data gives insights to take better decision and thus gain higher profits. He emphasized on characteristics of data viz. volume, variety, velocity, value. He referred Big data as the next frontier for the present and the future scenario. He also shared some cases relating the Business models and role of Big data in it. To list, some of them were “Retail”: when and what to order where, “Airlines”: hoe to price tickets, “web analytics” etc.
Vishal Dakoliya, National Head Business Development, Webdunia.com (India) Pvt. Ltd. shared his experience with the students. Stating observation as the key factor for the management of big data, he took examples from basics of home management, television and automobile industry. He said in the world of information, the challenge lies in how can we simplify, identify the purpose for the data collection and make the best use of Big Data. He took us to ancient times where languages, astrology originated, where everything is based on data. He added Information selling is a yet to come in India as an upcoming business model. Data has increased and will continue to increase, Availability and storage is no more a challenge. Purpose for the data and information, is what he referred as the key factor. He said it’s not just the data management but beyond it lies huge value, which is to be extracted, analysed and put to use. Giving a message to students, he said to make a career in data analytics, one has to become a data scientist.
Prof.K.R. Pardasani, M.A.N.I.T. focused on “Big data challenges for data mining”. Throwing the light upon the technical aspects he said data is the value given to an attribute of an entity. He discussed it at three levels viz. data, information, knowledge and its linkage to the different levels of organization. Referring the term BIG of BIG DATA as a fuzzy term, took an example of human anatomy cell genome to show the extent of big data. He denoted Data mining as the knowledge discovery from a large database. He also talked about data warehousing as a subject oriented, integrated, time variant, non-volatile collection of data used in support of management decision making process. He also discussed why organization requires data warehouse and its various models. He said human intervention is always required in mining of data to find out the data of relevance from the available one. Adding to the point, he said that sometimes Information grew bigger than the data and this is where human intelligence is applicable to bring it down to an appropriate size for analysis. He also talked about vague set theory, fuzzy set and soft set theory. As a statistician, he believes bigger is better. Bigger the data, better is the analysis and interpretation.
The seminar covered paper presentation competition by students on Big Data concerned to different domain. The joint winners for the competition were Rishu Gupta, Saurabh Chaudhary and Pratibha Singh, Kamlesh Chand Sainifrom M.A.N.I.T., Bhopal and the joint runners up were Aman Kumar , Raja Solanki and Namrata Gwal, Pawan Singh from Jaipuria Indore.
The seminar concentrated on practical applications and utilization of big data. It aimed to cut through the marketing hype and help participants understand the competitive advantage. Participants also got a chance to interact with industry experts and academicians who are currently working ‘Live’ on Big Data analytics.