Posted by Rob Knies
Computing today is generating and capturing a wealth of data previously unimaginable. Such information has great promise for unlocking some of society’s most elusive secrets, but how can those secrets be unearthed and identified?
That pursuit provided the impetus behind Big Data Analytics 2013, a first-ever workshop held at Microsoft Research Cambridge on May 23-24. More than 130 participants from academia and industry—including a strong contingent from the hosting lab, Microsoft Research Redmond, Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, and Advanced Technology Labs Europe—gathered to discuss and identify the most important and challenging directions for the evolution of algorithms and systems for big data.
“The organization of the workshop was prompted by a surge of interest and activity in the area of big-data analytics,” says Milan Vojnovic, co-organizer of the event and senior researcher in the Cambridge Systems and Networking group, “including platforms for various kinds of processing, such as batch processing and querying of massive data sets, real-time analytics, streaming computations, and analytics on special data structures such as graphical data.
