We are Big Data The Future of the Information Society
Sander Klous holds a PhD in High Energy Physics and contributed to the discovery of the Higgs boson at CERN (Nobel prize 2013). Klous works at KPMG and is professor in Big Data at the University of Amsterdam. Nart Wielaard is a self-employed consultant an
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We are Big Data The Future of the Information Society
We are Big Data
Sander Klous · Nart Wielaard
We are Big Data The Future of the Information Society
Sander Klous Informatics Institute University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, North Holland The Netherlands
Nart Wielaard Nart BV Haarlem, North Holland The Netherlands
and Management Consulting KPMG Amstelveen, North Holland The Netherlands
ISBN 978-94-6239-182-6 ISBN 978-94-6239-183-3 (eBook) DOI 10.2991/978-94-6239-183-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016937342 © Atlantis Press and the author(s) 2016 This book, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced for commercial purposes in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system known or to be invented, without prior permission from the Publisher. Printed on acid-free paper
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Art becomes art when you can see the complete picture. Data acquires value when you can understand the context.
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What is this? It will become clear as you read this book.
Foreword
Big Data matters—a lot. But in a more subtle and fundamental way than is often portrayed today. Marketers from consulting and IT companies tout the virtues of Big Data with deafening volume, limited variety, and increasing velocity. Their mantra is that with new IT and a consulting partner lined up, any company can turn itself into a Big Data superpower. That is patently wrong—and the marketers’ behavior is as predictable as it is irresponsible. By the same token, commentators and self-styled cyber-experts paint dire monochromatic pictures of a Big Data future in which everything human will have become eliminated. Listening to some of them, it seems that with Big Data, we’ll turn our computers into weapons of mass destruction. Such doomsday predictions may sell books but, just like the Big Data hype do little to improve our understanding of what Big Data actually is—and how fundamentally it will change our economy and our society. Big Data is, at its very core, nothing more than process, a unique mechanism of how we humans make sense of the reality around us and, based on this understanding, make predictions about our future that are far more accurate than the tea-leaf reading of the past. For all of human history, we have made sense of the world that surrounds us by watching it and thinking about it—by theorizing about how reality comes together. And we gathered data about the world to prove (or disprove) our theories. Over time, we realized the need to see the world in rational terms, and to engage vii
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Foreword
in understanding it in a methodical fashion. This is the seedling that bloomed in the Age of Enlightenment and which was nurtured among others by Spinoza, one of Holland’s intellectual heroes. Eventually this yielded the “scientific method” and the great progress in understanding and utilizing the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. As a result, many more people have been living longer and better. But until recently, the collection, analysis, a
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