Assignment

Instructions: Answer each question thoroughly. Points will be deducted for fragmentary answers.

1. Crowdsourcing is the gathering of data in real time, as it happens, from a growing crowd of people. Because of the large number of students who now own phones with Internet access, crowdsourcing on campus could start to be useful. In what settings would making decisions based on information from a gathering crowd on campus be valuable? How would you react to your professor using a form of crowdsourcing to determine your grade on an essay?

2. You work at a local coffee shop that offers live music on the weekends. Your boss has asked you to help the coffee shop enhance its web presence to better connect with customers. On which social networking sites would you create a page for the coffee shop? What types of information would you post on the social network pages? What strategies would you use to make customers aware of the coffee shop's social networking sites?

3. Big Data, which means many things to many people, is not a new technological fad. It is a business priority that has the potential to profoundly change the competitive landscape in today's globally integrated economy. In addition to providing innovative solutions to enduring business challenges, Big Data and analytics instigate new ways to transform processes, organizations, entire industries, and even society all together. Yet extensive media coverage makes it hard to distinguish hype from reality. CERN (http://home.cern/ is the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It plays a leading role in fundamental studies of physics. It has been instrumental in many key global innovations and breakthrough discoveries in theoretical physics and today operates the world's largest particle physics laboratory, home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Collision events in LHC occur 40 million times per second, resulting in 15 petabytes of data produced annually at the CERN Data Center. CERN does not have the capacity to process all of the data that it generates, and therefore relies on numerous other research centers all around the world to access and process the colossal volume of data. Processing all the data of their experiments requires an enormously complex distributed and heterogeneous computing and data management system. With such vast quantities of data, both structured and unstructured, information discovery is a big challenge for CERN.

a. Discuss how the Large Hadron Collider works. What does it produce?

b. Explain the data challenges at CERN, and the solution. How did Big Data address the challenges?

c. Is the current solution sufficient?

d. Identify other organizations that use or have used Big Data to analyze massive volumes of data.

e. What do you think the future of Big Data will be like? Will it lose its popularity to something else? If so, what will it be?