Facebook’s Jeff Hammerbacher is an interesting person. He literally coined the term – data scientist and has been one of the big proponents of data mining. He found that the big predictor whether people will take action is dependent on whether they had seen their friends do the same thing. This is true whether you are in a public setting or whether you are online. Jeff used that observation with Facebook to notify everyone on what the other friend did or was doing and this boosted interaction among the members. Thus, just by using that observation increased the interaction among people.
He has since then founded Cloudera and using the data for various purposes including mining of biological data as the video below shows.
{youtube}OVBZTDREg7c{/youtube}