Who is not talking about big data today

The São Paulo School of Advanced Science on e-Science for Bioenergy Research, SPSAS e-SciBioenergy, was held Oct. 22-26th at Brazilian Bioethanol Science and Technology Laboratory – CTBE. I was honored to be one of the invited speakers and had a marvelous time with the students and researchers talking about “big data”.

I learned that the organizing committee selected 79 students from over 250 applications worldwide. My half-day lecture on Open Data for Open Science was the last item on the program, but the room was still full and the discussion was hot. We talked about many ‘big data’ research topics during the lecture. Offline during the breaks, the conversation continued on data and how we can deal with data efficiently by using cutting-edge tools such as WorldWide Telescope, Layerscape, the various Add-on’s for Excel and Word, Windows Azure, and Azure DataMarket. I expect to continue some of the conversations in email.

As one of the students commented “who is not talking about big data today”? the consensus was that “big data” has become such a popular topic because it implies big social impact. Global Warming, biodiversity in the Amazon forest, renewable energy and sugar cane, … these are not just science projects but something that can potentially change our daily life. It attracts talents from multiple scientific domains and computer science to solve the big data problems together. That’s what this event did for the community beyond any given domain and beyond Brazil.

I want to congratulate the Organizing Committee and thank them for a wonderful eScience experience that the event provided for all the participants.