From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

What is your tip for not getting overwhelmed by big data?

From the course: DJ Patil: Ask Me Anything

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What is your tip for not getting overwhelmed by big data?

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(gentle music) - What is your tip to keep from getting overwhelmed with all kinds of big data? - I think it's very specific on the type of problem that's out there. You know part of the beauty is that you have all these volumes of data that are out there so you have access to things in really remarkable ways, but one of the beauties of that is that the thing I almost always try to do is how do you take big data and make it small. How do you make it tangible? And there's two ways that I think you can make it tangible very quickly. One is you can try to reduce the scope of the problem or look for correlations and then try to answer things. The other way is to go find the people that actually generated the data or are the data points and ask them. Very often if you just go talk to somebody and you kind of start digging into how that data was created or what's going on, you actually find a different, more interesting aspect. I'll give you a very concrete example. Traffic fatalities. Is the question just distracted driving? Is the question faster cars? Is the question other things? If you go talk to the people in the local community who are the first responders they actually have a lot of information and they show like, it could be bikes. We have more bikes on the road. We don't have protective bike lanes. There's all sorts of other interesting things that start to show up. So that tethering of real-world interaction with just data point information changes the whole dynamics. (gentle music)

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