Future Foundation conference — Big data and the future of insight

Abstract

It was back in November 2011 when Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist for Amazon, and Peter Hirshberg, former head of enterprise marketing for Apple, introduced big data to the United Nations in a presentation that identified how social media posts throw off the sort of clues about consumers about which social scientists only used to dream. From credit card transactions to mobile apps, the signals from this unprecedented explosion in data were hailed as having the potential to transform society and business. Hirshberg used the now much-feted expression data is the new oil to explain the potential value of this phenomenon. Realizing that value is more complex and was the focus of the Future Foundation event held on 12 March 2014, Big Data and the Future of Insight, which took a look at how new data streams might be combined with classic research techniques and methodologies to extract at least some of that potential. By using machine-learning to tackle the volume of data now being generated, it starts to be possible to find the signal among the noise.