Timothy McGovern

Tim McGovern is an editor at O'Reilly Media. With a degree in ancient history, he feels extremely comfortable asking those who collect mountains of data, "So what are you going to do with that?" He lives in Chicago, but no matter where you meet him, it's likely that he arrived by bike.

The original big data industry

Oil and gas exploration have long been at the forefront of data collection and analysis.

Download our new free report, “Oil, Gas, and Data: High-Performance Data Tools in the Production of Industrial Power,” looking at the role of data, machine learning, and predictive analytics in oil and gas exploration.

Petroleum extraction is an industry marked by price volatility and high capital exposure in new ventures. Big data is reducing risk, not just to capital, but to workers and the environment as well, as Dan Cowles explores in the new free report Oil, Gas, and Data.

At the Global Petroleum Show in Calgary, exhibiting alongside massive drill heads, chemical analysts, and the latest in valves and pipes are companies with a decidedly more virtual product: data. IBM’s Aspera, Abacus Datagraphics, Fujitsu, and Oracle’s Front Porch Digital are pitching data intake, analysis, and storage services to the oil industry, and industry stalwarts such as Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, and BP have been developing these capacities in-house.

The primary benefits of big data occur at the upstream end of petroleum production: exploration, discovery, and drilling. Better analysis of seismic and other geological data allows for drilling in more productive locations, and continual monitoring of equipment results in more uptime and better safety for both workers and environment. These marginal gains can be enough to keep an entire region competitive: the trio of cheap sensors, fast networks, and distributed computation that we’ve so often seen in other industries is the difference-maker keeping the North Sea oilfields productive in sub-$100/barrel market. Read more…

Now available: Big Data Now, 2014 edition

Our wrap-up of important developments in the big data field.

In the four years we’ve been producing Big Data Now, our wrap-up of important developments in the big data field, we’ve seen tools and applications mature, multiply, and coalesce into new categories. This year’s free wrap-up of Radar coverage is organized around seven themes:
  • Cognitive augmentation: As data processing and data analytics become more accessible, jobs that can be automated will go away. But to be clear, there are still many tasks where the combination of humans and machines produce superior results.
  • Intelligence matters: Artificial intelligence is now playing a bigger and bigger role in everyone’s lives, from sorting our email to rerouting our morning commutes, from detecting fraud in financial markets to predicting dangerous chemical spills. The computing power and algorithmic building blocks to put AI to work have never been more accessible.
  • Read more…