Communications of the ACM
'Big Data' From Social Media, Elsewhere Online Redefines Trend-Watching
Analysts and others are using Twitter to monitor sentiment about stocks.
Credit: Washington Post
Trend analysis and forecasting is being rethought thanks to the explosion of data generated by social media and other services, with IBM estimating that about 2.5 quintillion bytes are created each day.
Mining this data to extract trend insights through advanced computing and analytics "enables us to watch changes in society in real time and make decisions in a way we haven't been able to ever before," says Harvard University professor Gary King. For example, Barack Obama's reelection campaign employs scores of people using computers to monitor sentiment about candidates via Twitter. Big data's transformative power is being felt most profoundly in the finance industry, with such information being fed into computers that drive high-frequency trading algorithms.
However, there is considerable pushback against big data mining by organizations worried that the way the data is used undermines personal privacy, a situation compounded by the lack of a definitive regulatory framework. Although the size of the data sets is such that they are routinely analyzed in aggregate, privacy proponents are concerned that information can still be linked to individuals. Information asymmetry, in which certain parties have an unfair advantage because they have better information than others, is another cause for worry.
From Washington Post
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