The Big Data - Same Humans Problem

Abstract

Big data is transforming all aspects of the human experience, from everyday life and scientific discovery to medicine, business, and government decision-making. Advances in computing technology lead to exponential increases in data generated, collected, and processed. However, the ability of humans to process data has not changed significantly in the last few decades.

We refer to this disparity as the Big Data - Same Humans Problem.

This distinction leads to two types of scalability in big data systems:

• Systems scalability — traditional measures such as response time, throughput, scale-up, and scale-out
• Human scalability — how well the system ensures that human users do not get lost in a sea of data

Scalability from a human’s point of view will soon become a requirement for successful big data systems and applications. Relevant research areas include summarization, ranking, recommendations, outlier detection, personalization, classification, visualization (visual analytics), and crowd-sourcing.