Data analysis and Big Data

Dr Dharmendra Modha’s group at IBM has been simulating the whole brain one cell at a time. They started with cat brain simulation and have almost reached the whole brain simulation except it runs about 1542 times slower.  This is a simulation of nearly 1.6 billion virtual neurons and 9 trillion synapses. The power consumption…

The current period has been called the information age, where information is the most important element of society. Interestingly, with so much data being collected, the next age is the data analysis age wherein the analysis of data is important. An interesting thing about research in medicine is that it has been oriented towards clinical…

Walmart as is well known is a big retailer, not just big but massive. They have been a big retailer since a long time and have been processing large data before the term “Big data existed”. The interesting feature about them is that they are about the biggest retailer with a net turnover of $450…

Typically, labor statistics are collected tediously by the staff of Bureau of Labor Statistics by visiting, faxing and calling different stores, offices and online retailers in 90 cities across the nation and getting back nearly 80,000 prices for different items. This costs about $250MM per year and takes at least several weeks to put together….

Companies that you previously did not think were in the data mining business or in the prediction business have used data mining technologies in strange but very useful ways. Your company too has some “useless” data that can be harvested. It really comes down to asking the correct question. Google obviously is centrally in the…

Doing data mining for other companies, have helped the data mining companies in many ways besides the services that they offer. In some cases, they have made several new businesses. There are two examples that are mentioned in “Big Data – A revolution” by Victor Mayer-Schoneberger and Kenneth Cukier In Amazon early days, Amazon made…

When we think about the brain and our ability to see, we realize that when we recognize people and see, we do not see everything as in a photograph but more see patterns. If the face matches the pattern that we recognized before as a person then we recognize him as such and not necessarily…

Databases a simple definition: Database is a collection of data that is managed as a single unit. There are Six major types or models of databases: Flat file databases: These were databases that managed all the data in one flat file. The file was just a list of items. There were several ways that this…

Databases are used everywhere and are critical to most of the informatics work that is done. They are also very critical part of Big data analysis Since databases store critical data, they are handled very carefully. They are obviously backed up regularly but also get replicated and distributed. With large databases, there are many ways…

As scientists make biological models, it is difficult to create frameworks of mathematics and formula’s around it. Usually this requires significant customization for each model. Dr Sorger’ Lab has developed a Python framework for creating systems biology models. These translate the equations to the models and allow a tedious task to be significantly simplified by…