From Information to Foresight: Getting Beyond the Bits

Data volumes are sky-rocketing, and new sources and types of information are proliferating; we can now track and obtain data faster than ever before. But data is only of value if you can extract insight from it – insights that let you solve your challenges, improve your processes, attract new clients, and be more nimble in your business. There is a real opportunity to harness this data and gain insight to improve our world – but to do so, we must do more than capture information. We must correlate and align information across sources, extract meaning from it, and leverage that meaning to create value. This talk will describe some of the challenges of capturing, integrating, and analyzing information and some of the progress that has been made in terms of runtimes and tools to support these tasks, as well as some ongoing research in this space. We will highlight some successful applications of these technologies in a variety of fields, and close with a proposal to work together to advance the state of the art in these technologies and in their application.

Speaker: Laura Haas, IBM Fellow and Director, Institute for Massive Data, Analytics and Modeling, IBM Research