Big Data
Researchers have been devoting enormous energies to finding biological markers that make psychiatric diagnosis more objective. One of the goals of computational psychiatry is to draw connections between symptoms and causes, regardless of diagnoses. However, many symptoms are shared amongst numerous conditions, and multiple conditions often occur together. To deal with this complexity doctors need more powerful tools. In the age of big data neuroscientists routinely handle extremely high-dimensional data sets. Initially, these “data-driven” efforts focused on developing automatic tools for objective diagnosis. The moderate accuracy obtained in some of these studies indicates the disorders are indeed reflected in the brain, but there are problems to overcome before such tools are clinically useful. For instance, many clinical cases are ambiguous, and it is not clear how useful classification systems, which tend to be developed using clear-cut cases, would be in those situations. However, many psychiatrists intend to go beyond diagnosis to make predictions about how an illness will proceed for a given individual, and as far as predicting suicide risk, for example, or treatment response.
MIT is rolling out a new Big Data finishing school, which will be a one-year course for prospective students. New students can expect to pay $75,000 in tuition fees for their Master of Business Analytics degree, with classes ranging from “Data mining: Finding the Data and Models that Create Value” to “Applied Probability”. MIT announced the courses this month and is confident that there will be no shortage of people willing to sign up. They expect that each course will attract 15-20 applicants who feel they have the requisite strength in math, computer science, and statistics. High quality global journalism requires investment. With more devices being connected to the Internet, the amount of data that can be sifted by businesses is growing rapidly, as are the investments by companies seeking to keep pace with this trend. Workers who can demonstrate that they have advanced data skills are in high demand. Big Data is becoming increasingly more important for companies; when LinkedIn analyzed global recruitment activity on its site over the course of 2015, it ranked “statistical analysis and data mining” as the second-hottest set of skills, after expertise in cloud and distributed computing.
Can Big Data Help Psychiatry Unravel the Complexity of Mental Illness? – Scientific America
New courses target the need for managers and techies to talk to each other as data proliferate – Financial Times
IoT/ IIoT
Gadgets 360 reports that India has big plans with the global IoT business, and expects to gain $300 billion by 2020, as well as gain 20 percent of market shares in another five years. These claims were made by Vice President of Nasscom (Industrial Initiative) K S Vishwanathan, who told reporters in Coimbatore that depending on the success of his newest venture, Coimbatore hub, he is expecting to launch centers in Pune, Baroda and Hyderabad, and Bengaluru. Vishwanathan also claimed nearly 1,000 startups are being added every year in India, which would make India third in the world in terms of numbers and continued growth.
Recently, we’ve been hearing a lot of noise about the Internet of Things in the consumer space. However, another area it’s making a difference is in heavy industries, which allow businesses to optimize big machinery and infrastructure they count upon. IIoT in a business sense has a lot of people excited, especially because of its ability for big machinery to be connected and talking to one another. Industries such as aerospace, defense, oil, and gas, are already proving the benefits IIoT offer their companies. One such company that is benefiting is the Railway Collision Avoidance System from Intelligence on Wheels. The company uses GPS to understand where it’s traveling and on which part of the track – as well as sensors to understand whether it’s on the left or right-hand side of the rail.
India to Capture 20 Percent of IoT Market: Nasscom – Gadgets
Seven industrial internet of things examples: IoT in heavy industry – ComputerWorldUK
eCommerce
Spring is here and CIO offers 13 helpful “spring cleaning tips” to help improve your eCommerce site. Some of the top suggested tips they offered were: audit your company’s website to understand which pages are performing well and which are not to help duplicate the pages that are successful and revamp the ones that are getting little to no views. The article also suggests webmasters complete an image inventory to ensure all photos are optimized images and up to date. Old images can date a website faster than words, and new images can make your site feel fresh. Additionally important is to ensure all links work. Having broken links can have bad SEO implications. Using tools like Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool will flag any pages that load with a ‘404 not found error’ page.
Self Service and Enterprise
The stakes are high in the world of analytics and reporting. According to Gartner, through 2016, only 10 percent of self-service business intelligence initiatives will be sufficiently well governed to prevent inconsistencies that adversely affect the business. Without appropriate processes and governance, self-service capabilities can introduce multiple versions of the truth, increase errors in reporting, and leave companies exposed to inconsistent information. Many organizations struggle to find the right approach. Everyone wants access to data, and they don’t necessarily want to rely on IT. But on the other hand, they want to be able to rely on the quality of any reports / dashboards they are leveraging. This CIO article suggests investing in BI and analytic environments that allow experimentation and data discovery., then follow up with resilient operationalized analytics solutions where a repeatable value is identified.
How partnerships between IT and the business breed success–CIO
Software Defined Networking
Last week at ONS in Santa Clara, the ONOS community (open source SDN networking OS for service providers) showcased its latest software release, Falcon. Along with other new applications, the release supports the central office re-architected as Data Center (CORD) project enhances support for “southbound” SDN protocols. CORD is a collaborative effort between AT&T and the Open Networking Lab to unify SDN, NFV and cloud technologies. Also during the summit, NEC Corporation of America announced the latest release of its ProgrammableFlow Networking Suite. The five-year-old ProgrammableFlow was the first commercial SDN solution to leverage the open source OpenFlow protocol, according to NEC. The new release optimizes the ability to manage and control networks, with improved network security and more operational cost savings.
Open Networking Summit Sees New Open Source ONOS Release, NEC Programmableflow Update – Virtualization Review