LATEST ARTICLES

First write like you speak, then write like you write

by Philip Yaffe

Each "Communication Corner" essay is self-contained; however, they build on each other. For best results, before reading this essay and doing the exercise, go to the first essay "How an Ugly Duckling Became a Swan," then read each succeeding essay.

In this installment, Philip Yaffe introduces a two-step plan to create well-written text that will not only impress the reader, but also engage the reader to digest and comprehend new ideas or concepts with ease.

Developing an Open Source 'Big Data' Cognitive Computing Platform: Big Data (Ubiquity symposium)

by Michael Kowolenko, Mladen A. Vouk

The ability to leverage diverse data types requires a robust and dynamic approach to systems design. The needs of a data scientist are as varied as the questions being explored. Compute systems have focused on the management and analysis of structured data as the driving force of analytics in business. As open source platforms have evolved, the ability to apply compute to unstructured information has exposed an array of platforms and tools available to the business and technical community. We have developed a platform that meets the needs of the analytics user requirements of both structured and unstructured data. This analytics workbench is based on acquisition, transformation, and analysis using open source tools such as Nutch, Tika, Elastic, Python, PostgreSQL, and Django to implement a cognitive compute environment that can handle widely diverse data, and can leverage the ever-expanding capabilities of infrastructure in order to provide intelligence augmentation.

High Performance Synthetic Information Environments
An integrating architecture in the age of pervasive data and computing: Big Data (Ubiquity symposium)

March 2018
by Christopher L. Barrett, Jeffrey Johnson, Madhav Marathe

The complexities of social and technological policy domains, such as the economy, the environment, and public health, present challenges that require a new approach to modeling and decision-making. The information required for effective policy and decision making in these complex domains is massive in scale, fine-grained in resolution, and distributed over many data sources. Thus, one of the key challenges in building systems to support policy informatics is information integration. Synthetic information environments (SIEs) present a methodological and technological solution that goes beyond the traditional approaches of systems theory, agent-based simulation, and model federation. An SIE is a multi-theory, multi-actor, multi-perspective system that supports continual data uptake, state assessment, decision analysis, and action assignment based on large-scale high-performance computing infrastructures. An SIE allows rapid course-of-action analysis to bound variances in outcomes of policy interventions, which in turn allows the short time-scale planning required in response to emergencies such as epidemic outbreaks.

Technology and Business Challenges of Big Data in the Digital Economy: Big Data (Ubiquity symposium)

January 2018
by Dave Penkler

The early digital economy during the dot-com days of internet commerce successfully faced its first big data challenges of click-stream analysis with map-reduce technology. Since then the digital economy has been becoming much more pervasive. As the digital economy evolves, looking to benefit from its burgeoning big data assets, an important technical-business challenge is emerging: How to acquire, store, access, and exploit the data at a cost that is lower than the incremental revenue or GDP that its exploitation generates. Especially now that efficiency increases, which lasted for 50 years thanks to improvements in semiconductor manufacturing, is slowing and coming to an end.