Expert Talk: Ted Dunning on Big Data and decision making

Jun 16, 2012

Sogeti Labs

“Big Data has real implications for real businesses”

“Anytime you are talking terabytes and above you are in the boundaries of Big Data (…) Unless your gigabytes are moving really quick, you are probably talking small data”

“Someone may describe a point A and a point B. I can find a new kind of ‘B’ and then find a line between A and the new B. Where there was no line possible between A and the original B. (…) I can invent new lines, but I can’t invent new points.”

Exploring the Big Data realm, we often talk to some of the most profound experts in the industry. We talk to them about their visions on technology and business, the impact of Big Data and what key concepts we should consider in our research. We would like to share these ‘Expert Talks’ with you during the next couple of months. Every week we will publish a few videos for you to enjoy and reflect on. We also would like to encourage you to share your reflections in the comments. This week in our video section: Ted Dunning, Chief Application Architect at MapR Technologies. Ted Dunning has held Chief Scientist positions at Veoh Networks, ID Analytics and at MusicMatch (now Yahoo Music). and also contributed to several Apache open source projects including Hadoop, Zookeeper and Hbase. He is also a committer for Apache Mahout.

We spoke with Dr. Dunning in California on how he defines Big Data and his perspective on the hype, how data transforms decision making and what he is most excited about for the next ten years. Later this week we will share part 2 of this interview. If you have any thoughts on these issues yourself, please feel free to share them in the comments.

Q: Where is the hype coming from and why are people talking about it right now?

Q: How do you define Big Data?

Q: Will it still be the CEO who is making the decisions or will there be a more distributed decision making process?

Q: What will be the most exciting thing that will have happened ten years from now?

About the author

Sogeti Labs

SogetiLabs gathers distinguished technology leaders from around the Sogeti world. It is an initiative explaining not how IT works, but what IT means for business.

Comments