New Florence. New Renaissance.

SapphireNow: The Students from Hasso Plattner Institute

During his keynote at SapphireNow last week, Dr. Hasso Plattner generously gave about 15 minutes to demos from two teams from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, an entity he started funding 15 years ago to develop systems engineering skills (watch that portion at 53.45 in this video) 

To me what is interesting is this reflects a new source of talent for advanced analytics/Big Data skills. Along with a growing base of other math/stat graduates around the world, crowdsourced data scientists from entities like Kaggle, new specialty analytical integrators like Mu Sigma, customers have far more choice than the “old faithful” SAP consultants and service partners, who are trying to migrate from their transactional and infrastructure heritage.

Monetizing your movements

"Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. carrier with more than 98 million retail customers, shows how such a program could come together. In late 2011, the company changed its privacy policy so that it could share anonymous and aggregated subscriber data with outside parties. That made possible the launch of its Precision Market Insights division last October.

The program, still in its early days, is creating a natural extension of what already happens online, with websites tracking clicks and getting a detailed breakdown of where visitors come from and what they are interested in.

Similarly, Verizon is working to sell demographics about the people who, for example, attend an event, how they got there or the kinds of apps they use once they arrive. In a recent case study, says program spokeswoman Debra Lewis, Verizon showed that fans from Baltimore outnumbered fans from San Francisco by three to one inside the Super Bowl stadium. That information might have been expensive or difficult to obtain in other ways, such as through surveys, because not all the people in the stadium purchased their own tickets and had credit card information on file, nor had they all downloaded the Super Bowl’s app."

MIT Technology Review

Photo Credit Verizon on audiences for its Precision Market Insights (click to enlarge)

Big Data and HR

NY Times on an emerging discipline of work-force science

"Today, every e-mail, instant message, phone call, line of written code and mouse-click leaves a digital signal. These patterns can now be inexpensively collected and mined for insights into how people work and communicate, potentially opening doors to more efficiency and innovation within companies.

Digital technology also makes it possible to conduct and aggregate personality-based assessments, often using online quizzes or games, in far greater detail and numbers than ever before.

In the past, studies of worker behavior were typically based on observing a few hundred people at most. Today, studies can include thousands or hundreds of thousands of workers, an exponential leap ahead."

Big Data and Story Telling

One of the best sessions in the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics conference I attended in March was one which started with a 8 minute clip on how ESPN analysts come up with all kinds of interesting new metrics in a variety sports (WAR in baseball, Win shares and BPI in Basketball, QBR in football).

It then follows a panel discussion of how sports media balance the math with the jock factor.Every industry can learn from the pioneering work being done in sports analytics.

 

The Big Data of the NFL draft

Each NFL team runs between 60 and 70 offensive plays a game. Another 10-15 special plays.  Multiply that by 18 players a play ( 9 offensive, 9 defensive). Vary that by unique situations – injuries, how far behind a team is, the audibles a quarterback calls which affect availability of players for next few plays. Multiply that by 16 games a season, 4 in pre-season. Players retire, contracts end – the talent management challenge is constant and complex.

The annual NFL draft (which ended last night) is a major source of new talent for teams. The data they have on each player is impressive. 4 years of college stats. Many more – 40 yard dash, bench press, vertical leap – from the annual NFL Combine (like in graph below)

The NFL draft was designed to bring “parity” to the league so the weakest teams get the early picks. But there are all kinds of trades. So, you end up with an unequal scenario this year where “of the 254 picks, the San Francisco 49ers, Seattle Seahawks and Green Bay Packers each made 11, tied for the most by any team. Those three franchises all reached the Divisional Playoffs in 2012.”

And you thought Geno Smith’s ill advised tweets or Manti Te’o’s imaginary girl friend affected their draft chances? Maybe – but likely very small factors compared to the mountain of data the teams crunched through in making their choices.

The brave new world of customer data

I recently posted What your hotel knows about you

At Inforum yesterday, I heard Bob Dunfee of Infor present a hotel use case (“Happy Hotels”) and the data they can pretty easily (and without violating too many privacy rules)  gather for one of their patrons (“Lindsay Smith”). His slide below shows existing data most CRM and internal systems have collected over time from traditional channels and then the new customer data especially from Lindsay’s Facebook social graph. Infor's own CRM assets leverage Radian6 from salesforce.com for broader social listening.

Bob also described a bit of Infor’s relationship with 8thBridge (which is especially successful in retail circles) and the addition of actual commerce and product data makes the customer profile grow even thicker.

When you step back and add geospatial and other data from mobile channels,  you see the amazing amount of customer data that is becoming available to most industries.

Bob said it well when he summarized we are moving into a world of “Actionable Social CRM”

Processing Massive Amount of Crime Video

Wonder how the investigators in the Boston bombing are reviewing countless store, building, police and citizen provided videos?

Likely using technology and process the LEVA Forensic Video Analysis Response Team used to process over 5000 hours of video evidence related to the June 15, 2011 Stanley Cup Riot in Vancouver.

The review and tagging is a painstaking process. 52 analysts then spent 14 days processing that footage, identifying 15,000 criminal acts perpetrated by 300 rioters.

 

The Only Good News from Boston: Mountains of Evidence

It is small consolation to those who lost their lives or their limbs, and to countless others whose memory of an icon of spring in Boston is forever scarred, but the reality is the FBI led investigation into the Marathon bombs should have a staggering amount of evidentiary data to sort through:

• Video from police and hotel, store, parking cameras around the area
• Thousands of video clips and photos from family and friends of over 15,000 runners who had finished the race just before the explosions
• DNA and explosive and design "signatures" from the bombs
• Cell phone traffic from/to the site at time of incident
• Airline manifests
• National security analysis of "chatter" before and after incident
• Medical reports from local hospitals
• Tips being called in by citizens
• Satellite coverage of the race
• Pattern analysis by the countless federal, state and local agencies

Photo Credit

The Return of American Manufacturing

Time's cover story (sub required) - how technology (3D printing, advanced analytics), cheaper energy, smarter workers - are all helping the US rev up its manufacturing engine.

"The past several months alone have seen some surprising reversals. Apple, famous for the city-size factories in China that produce its gadgets, decided to assemble one of its Mac computer lines in the U.S. Walmart, which pioneered global sourcing to find the lowest-priced goods for customers, said it would pump up spending with American suppliers by $50 billion over the next decade--and save money by doing so. Airbus will build JetBlue's jets in Alabama. Meanwhile, in North Carolina's furniture industry, which has lost 70,000 jobs to rivals abroad, Ashley Furniture is investing at least $80 million to build a new plant. "If you go back 10 years, we didn't think we'd be manufacturing in the U.S.," says Ashley's CEO, Todd Wanek."

 

The Big Data of Antarctica's sea floor

Instead of digitizing existing nautical charts, the team incorporated detailed data from water-depth sounding instruments aboard research ships and mathematical models to interpolate three-dimensional geographic data points on the seafloor. Multibeam bathymetric survey techniques provide a rapid means of determining the morphology and nature of the seafloor. The recent Hydrosweep DS-2 System onboard RV Polarstern provides 59 individual soundings of the water depth and echo strength for each ping.

“We were ultimately able to work with a data set comprising some 4.2 billion individual values,” says Jan Erik Arndt, the editor of the International Bathymetric Chart of the Southern Ocean and AWI expert.

Their resulting chart offers 500-square-meter resolution of the waters south of 60 degrees south latitude, which demarcates the northern extent of the Southern Ocean.

Txchnologist