By the end of this year, individuals and organizations will have generated nearly 3 zettabytes of digital data, a volume 3 billion times greater than the capacity of a terabyte hard drive. From emails and purchase trans- actions, to health measurements and Facebook posts, to cellphone calls and streaming movies, data fuels our technological world, and we are creating it at an ever- increasing pace and in a proliferating range of forms.
This vast, overflowing pool of information can be a gold mine for those with the right tools to comb it for telling patterns. Researchers at WPI are among those looking to harness this torrent of data to tackle problems as diverse as hospital-acquired infections to consumer fraud. From algorithms that pull insights from data on the fly to analytical techniques that draw on massive data sets to make useful predictions about the future, these researchers are helping advance the emerging science of "big data."
Insights in the Blink of an Eye Elke Rundensteiner, professor of computer science, is a prime example of this forward-thinking research. She has been exploring ways to extract actionable insights in real time from the streaming data from sensors, smartphones, and social media platforms — a process she calls complex event stream processing. "Having access to the right infor- mation at the right moment, possibly fused together from numerous sources, can be a critical capability in many domains," she says.
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