From playing with your phone, to buying things in Walmart, everything you do is turned into valuable information. How does anyone make sense of the huge amounts of data? In order to get answers, you’d have to dive deeper into the world of big data.
As you may already know, computers are modeled to work in a way that’s similar to our brains. They take data, process it, and then store it for later use. The main difference between us and machines is the processor’s capacity. Computers are capable of storing higher volumes of information at much higher speeds. Some of the fastest supercomputers process data at speeds around 10 petaflops per second!
So how is the stored data used? It’s all about patterns. Once a company has figured out the trends in your behavior, they can move toward predicting what your next steps will be. Hopefully this doesn’t mark the beginning of a world similar to the one we saw in Minority Report.
Not a fan of companies treating you like a statistic? You’re in for some bad news. With a forecasted 200 billion devices connected to the internet in 2020, things are only going to get more interdependent on information processing. So it might be a good idea to get better acquainted with big data.