O'Reilly Strata
Big data comes to the big screen
Using data science to predict the Oscars
By Michael Gold, Farsite
Sophisticated algorithms are not going to write the perfect script or crawl YouTube to find the next Justin Beiber (that last one I think we can all be thankful for!). But a model can predict the probability of a nominee winning the Oscar, and recently our model has Argo overtaking Lincoln as the likely winner of Best Picture. Every day on FarsiteForecast.com we’ve been describing applications of data science for the media and entertainment industry, illustrating how our models work, and updating the likely winners based on the outcomes of the Awards Season leading up to the Oscars. Just as predictive analytics provides valuable decision-making tools in sectors from retail to healthcare to advocacy, data science can also empower smarter decisions for entertainment executives, which led us to launch the Oscar forecasting project. While the potential for data science to impact any organization is as unique as each company itself, we thought we’d offer a few use cases that have wide application for media and entertainment organizations.
BigData Top 100 Initiative
A Call for Industry-Standard Benchmarks for Big Data Platforms at Strata SC 2013
By Milind Bhandarka, Chaitan Baru, Raghunath Nambiar, Meikel Poess, and Dr. Tilmann Rabl
Big data systems are characterized by their flexibility in processing diverse data genres, such as transaction logs, connection graphs, and natural language text, with algorithms characterized by multiple communication patterns, e.g. scatter-gather, broadcast, multicast, pipelines, and bulk-synchronous. A single benchmark that characterizes a single workload could not be representative of such a multitude of use-cases. However, our systematic study of several use-cases of current big data platforms indicates that most workloads are composed of a common set of stages, which capture the variety of data genres and algorithms commonly used to implement most data-intensive end-to-end workloads. Our upcoming session at Strata SC discusses the BigData Top 100 List, a new community-based initiative for benchmarking big data systems.
The future of big data with BDAS, the Berkeley Data Analytics Stack
Preview of an upcoming tutorial at Strata Santa Clara 2013
By Andy Konwinski, Ion Stoica, and Matei Zaharia
This month at Strata, the U.C. Berkeley AMPLab will be running a full day of big data tutorials.In this post, we present the motivation and vision for the Berkeley Data Analytics Stack (BDAS), and an overview of several BDAS components that we released over the past two years, including Mesos, Spark, Spark Streaming, and Shark.
While batch processing systems like Hadoop MapReduce paved the way for organizations to ask questions about big datasets, they represent only the beginning of what users need to do with big data. More and more, users wish to move from periodically building reports about datasets to continuously using new data to make informed business decisions in real-time. Achieving these goals imposes three key requirements on big data processing:
- Low latency queries: Interactive ad-hoc queries allows data scientists to find valuable inferences faster, or explore a larger solution space to make better decisions. Furthermore, there is an increasing need for stream processing, as this allows organizations to make decisions in real-time, such as detecting an SLA violation and fixing the problem before the users notice, or deciding what ads to show based on user’s live tweets.
- Sophisticated analysis: People are increasingly looking to use new state of art algorithms, such as predictive machine learning algorithms, to make better forecasts and decisions.
- Unification of existing data computation models: Users want to integrate interactive queries, batch, and streaming processing to handle the ever increasing requirements of their processing pipelines. For example, detecting anomalies in user behavior may require (1) stream processing to compare the behavior of users in real-time across different segments (e.g., genre, ages, location, device), (2) interactive queries to detect differences in user’s daily (or weekly) behavior, and (3) batch processing to build sophisticated predictive models.
In response to the above requirements, more than three years ago we began building BDAS.