Strata Week: MIT and Massachusetts bet on big data

MIT and Massachusetts plan a big data initiative, Cisco predicts the Internet's big data future.

Here are a few of the big data stories that caught my attention this week.

MIT makes a big data push

MIT unveiled its big data research plans this week with a new initiative: bigdata@csail. CSAIL is the university’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. According to the initiative’s website, the project will “identify and develop the technologies needed to solve the next generation data challenges which require the ability to scale well beyond what today’s computing platforms, algorithms, and methods can provide.”

The research will be funded in part by Intel, which will contribute $2.5 million per year for up to five years. As part of the announcement, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick added that his state was forming a Massachusetts Big Data initiative that would provide matching grants for big data research, something he hopes will make the state “well-known for big data research.”

Cisco’s predictions for the Internet

Cisco released its annual forecast for Internet networking. Not surprisingly, Cisco projects massive growth in networking, with annual global IP traffic reaching 1.3 zettabytes by 2016. “The projected increase of global IP traffic between 2015 and 2016 alone is more than 330 exabytes,” according to the company’s press release, “which is almost equal to the total amount of global IP traffic generated in 2011 (369 exabytes).”

Cisco points to a number of factors contributing to the explosion, including more Internet-connected devices, more users, faster Internet speeds, and more video.

Open data startup Junar raises funding

The Chilean data startup Junar announced this week that it had raised a seed round of funding. The startup is an open data platform with the goal of making it easy for anyone to collect, analyze, and publish.
GigaOm’s Barb Darrow writes:

“Junar’s Open Data Platform promises to make it easier for users to find the right data (regardless of its underlying format); enhance it with analytics; publish it; enable interaction with comments and annotation; and generate reports. Throughout the process it also lets user manage the workflow and track who has accessed and downloaded what, determine which data sets are getting the most traction etc.”

Junar joins a number of open data startups and marketplaces that offer similar or related services, including Socrata and DataMarket.

Have data news to share?

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