In what the US Federal Communications Commission has termed as an “unacceptable” usage of personal consumer information for marketing purposes, telecom giant, Verizon Communications has agreed to pay a fine of $7.4 million to the US Treasury. Travis LeBlanc, Acting Chief of the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau said in a statement, “In today’s increasingly connected world, it is critical that every phone company honor its duty to inform customers of their privacy choices and then to respect those choices.” “It is plainly unacceptable for any phone company to use its customers’ personal information for thousands of marketing campaigns without even giving them the choice to opt out,” he said. According to the US Communications Act, telecom companies must get the approval of its customers through either an “opt in” or “opt...
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Last Thursday, the Big Data community of Berlin came together in the aptly named Innospace (Innovation Space) for Big Data, Berlin. Over 350 people attended, providing an incredible cross-section of business and data science interests from Europe’s Silicon Valley. The venue — which usually caters to a max audience of 200 people — was filled with developers, innovators and executives. The objective? To network, collaborate and interact. The unprecedented turnout made this the largest big data event in Berlin. Unlike other events the capital has hosted, Big Data Berlin was aimed at bringing the whole of big data ecosystem together under one roof — from business professionals to software developers and data enthusiasts. “In Berlin there are events that are very tech focussed and there needs to be an event...
Read on »
Think Big Analytics, a Big Data consulting firm primarily focused on Hadoop, becomes the latest in a series of acquisitions made by Teradata. The announcement comes just a few months after Teradata’s purchase of Revelytix and Hadapt, marking a clear intention to “embrace Hadoop and other big data technologies in order to provide a bridge to its data warehouse systems“ “We’re excited to take the next step in our journey to build the premier big data solution services organization,” explained the co-founder and president of Think Big Analytics, Rick Farnell. “Combining industry-leading Hadoop and data science expertise with the industry’s leading platform for data analytics is a tremendous opportunity for our clients to innovate and realize game-changing value.” Think Big’s 100 employees will join Teradata’s consulting team of engineers, architects...
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How do you get all of your stakeholders engaged in data governance? I am sure that some readers of this post will be thinking “yes, I have this issue” or “I have seen this issue.” So, what is the best way to effectively engage your stakeholders? Your engagement model is dependent upon how much your stakeholders know about data governance. Below is a helpful way to introduce the topic… Essentially data governance is about having the highest quality information to make your business decisions. The key in obtaining stakeholder alignment is two-fold: Firstly, IF your stakeholders are new to the topic, focus on the diagram above. Remember, the primary goal of data governance is to provide your stakeholders with meaning information: this includes well defined data with the appropriate metadata...
Read on »
Since Microsoft began working with deep learning neural networks in 2009, we’ve seen huge improvements in the way algorithms can detect our language and dialogue. IBM have continued to pour money and resources into the development of Watson; Apple have moved the development of Siri in-house, to improve its NLP capabilities; we’ll soon see a version of Skype which can translate the spoken word on the fly. But Francisco Webber, co-founder of cortical.io, noticed a grey area in the realm of natural language processing. Most of it is heavily based in statistical analysis. “The problem with statistics”, he says, “is that it’s always right in principle but it’s not right in the sense that you can’t use it to create an NLP performance that is even close to what a...
Read on »
The story of how Michael Brown lost his life at the hands of the police two days before he was due to head off for college was a tale heard around the world. The incident- and resulting civil unrest- became more than a sum of its parts. They became a flashpoint of growing tensions surrounding racial bias and the militarisation of policing. They became a call-to-arms for change. But how might we go about implementing such change? Many are proclaiming big data as the answer. This is certainly not the first time that big data has been thrown out as the ultimate answer- it’s apparently also the solution to your business’ dwindling profit margins, to curbing disease outbreak, to building the artificial intelligence of the future, to winning elections. In...
Read on »
A Teradata sponsored survey, carried out by Onepoll, revealed that the UK falls behind on its Big Data utilisation capabilities. The survey involved 300 C-level executives at enterprise companies across the U.K., France and Germany. Duncan Ross, director of data science at Teradata notes that, instead of a “holistic view of how new data types can be joined to relational data”, IT execs in the UK think of big data in terms of MapReduce and NoSQL. As such, the survey found that British firms are “less creative in the application of data analytics techniques, less innovative in business conception, and more siloed in technology mentality than their continental cousins.” The OnePoll survey found that 20% of respondents in the UK were using three or more types of new data (text,...
Read on »
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In what the US Federal Communications Commission has termed as an “unacceptable” usage of personal consumer information for marketing purposes, telecom giant, Verizon Communications has agreed to pay a fine of $7.4 million to the US Treasury. Travis LeBlanc, Acting Chief of the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau said in a statement, “In today’s increasingly connected world, it is critical that every phone company honor its duty to inform customers of their privacy choices and then to respect those choices.” “It is plainly unacceptable for any phone company to use its customers’ personal information for thousands of marketing campaigns without even giving them the choice to opt out,” he said. According to the US Communications Act, telecom companies must get the approval of its customers through either an “opt in” or “opt...
Last Thursday, the Big Data community of Berlin came together in the aptly named Innospace (Innovation Space) for Big Data, Berlin. Over 350 people attended, providing an incredible cross-section of business and data science interests from Europe’s Silicon Valley. The venue — which usually caters to a max audience of 200 people — was filled with developers, innovators and executives. The objective? To network, collaborate and interact. The unprecedented turnout made this the largest big data event in Berlin. Unlike other events the capital has hosted, Big Data Berlin was aimed at bringing the whole of big data ecosystem together under one roof — from business professionals to software developers and data enthusiasts. “In Berlin there are events that are very tech focussed and there needs to be an event...
Think Big Analytics, a Big Data consulting firm primarily focused on Hadoop, becomes the latest in a series of acquisitions made by Teradata. The announcement comes just a few months after Teradata’s purchase of Revelytix and Hadapt, marking a clear intention to “embrace Hadoop and other big data technologies in order to provide a bridge to its data warehouse systems“ “We’re excited to take the next step in our journey to build the premier big data solution services organization,” explained the co-founder and president of Think Big Analytics, Rick Farnell. “Combining industry-leading Hadoop and data science expertise with the industry’s leading platform for data analytics is a tremendous opportunity for our clients to innovate and realize game-changing value.” Think Big’s 100 employees will join Teradata’s consulting team of engineers, architects...
How do you get all of your stakeholders engaged in data governance? I am sure that some readers of this post will be thinking “yes, I have this issue” or “I have seen this issue.” So, what is the best way to effectively engage your stakeholders? Your engagement model is dependent upon how much your stakeholders know about data governance. Below is a helpful way to introduce the topic… Essentially data governance is about having the highest quality information to make your business decisions. The key in obtaining stakeholder alignment is two-fold: Firstly, IF your stakeholders are new to the topic, focus on the diagram above. Remember, the primary goal of data governance is to provide your stakeholders with meaning information: this includes well defined data with the appropriate metadata...
Since Microsoft began working with deep learning neural networks in 2009, we’ve seen huge improvements in the way algorithms can detect our language and dialogue. IBM have continued to pour money and resources into the development of Watson; Apple have moved the development of Siri in-house, to improve its NLP capabilities; we’ll soon see a version of Skype which can translate the spoken word on the fly. But Francisco Webber, co-founder of cortical.io, noticed a grey area in the realm of natural language processing. Most of it is heavily based in statistical analysis. “The problem with statistics”, he says, “is that it’s always right in principle but it’s not right in the sense that you can’t use it to create an NLP performance that is even close to what a...
The story of how Michael Brown lost his life at the hands of the police two days before he was due to head off for college was a tale heard around the world. The incident- and resulting civil unrest- became more than a sum of its parts. They became a flashpoint of growing tensions surrounding racial bias and the militarisation of policing. They became a call-to-arms for change. But how might we go about implementing such change? Many are proclaiming big data as the answer. This is certainly not the first time that big data has been thrown out as the ultimate answer- it’s apparently also the solution to your business’ dwindling profit margins, to curbing disease outbreak, to building the artificial intelligence of the future, to winning elections. In...
A Teradata sponsored survey, carried out by Onepoll, revealed that the UK falls behind on its Big Data utilisation capabilities. The survey involved 300 C-level executives at enterprise companies across the U.K., France and Germany. Duncan Ross, director of data science at Teradata notes that, instead of a “holistic view of how new data types can be joined to relational data”, IT execs in the UK think of big data in terms of MapReduce and NoSQL. As such, the survey found that British firms are “less creative in the application of data analytics techniques, less innovative in business conception, and more siloed in technology mentality than their continental cousins.” The OnePoll survey found that 20% of respondents in the UK were using three or more types of new data (text,...
