Communications of the ACM
Data Analytics Anywhere and Everywhere
Credit: Supertotto
Data is now collected everywhere and can be accessed anywhere. Whether you are deciding which product to buy, which potential customer to visit, or which restaurant to frequent, many situations in our everyday personal and professional lives benefit from access to relevant, accurate, and actionable data. Such access supports awareness, promotes understanding, and helps us make the right decisions in today's complex information society. This access to anywhere data is made possible by an increasing amount of everywhere data collected from virtually all aspects of our physical and digital world:22 shopping lists and purchase histories; movie, music, and book preferences; electronic health records and medical test results; colleagues, friends, and family; professional experience and education; and more. While significant privacy, security, and safety concerns are intrinsic to this confluence of anywhere and everywhere data, there is also an unprecedented opportunity to use this data to support individuals navigating the complexities of their professional and personal lives. Fortunately, the last 20 years of the mobile revolution have given us the means to achieve this. Mobile is now the dominant computing platform on the planet, with more than 15 billion mobile devices in 2020a and more than six billion of them being "smart" and able to access the Internet.b However, these devices—for all their mobility—are currently mere portholes into the digital world, are rarely designed to work together effectively to support a single user let alone multiple ones, and lack the powerful analytical tools needed to enable data-driven decision making on the go.
Key Insights
Fortunately, this may be about to change, with mobile and ubiquitous computing46 as well as extended reality (XR)43 finally beginning to transform the fields of visualization and data science. Applying these technologies to data analysis suggests a future of ubiquitous19 and immersive analytics,31 where clusters of networked mobile devices form an ecosystem for data analytics that can be accessed anytime and anywhere. Such a vision of mobile, immersive, and ubiquitous sensemaking environments would blend state-of-the-art analytics methods with our physical reality to enable making sense of any kind of data in virtually any situation (see Figure 1). However, we should not be weaving computation into our everyday lives just because we can. Rather, progress in cognitive science11,30,41 supports leveraging the new generation of mobile, immersive, and ubiquitous technologies toward data analytics. These so-called post-cognitive frameworks suggest that human thought is not contained merely within our heads but encompasses the entire ecosystem37 of other people, physical artifacts in our surroundings, and our very own bodies. Distributing computational nodes into our physical surroundings will thus enable us to better scaffold analytical reasoning, creativity, and decision making.
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