process everywhere

The Economist recently published an excellent article painting a picture of the the emerging data explosion and of the challenges and opportunities that this explosion will present.  Apparently some are even calling it an “industrial revolution of data”!  The article explains the role that I aim to play in the revolution with the following paragraph:

Chief information officers (CIOs) have become somewhat more prominent in the executive suite, and a new kind of professional has emerged, the data scientist, who combines the skills of software programmer, statistician and storyteller/artist to extract the nuggets of gold hidden under mountains of data. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, predicts that the job of statistician will become the “sexiest” around. Data, he explains, are widely available; what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them.

Data, Data Everywhere, The Economist

You can’t fault Mr. Varian for adding some wishful thinking to his prediction.  I can say with 95% confidence that statisticians will not suddenly become sexy anytime soon.  Other than that, his assertions are true.

What follows is a brilliantly animated video that demonstrates the technological opportunities and challenges that lie in the very near future.  As computing power continues up the curve of Moore’s Law and chips get smaller, faster, and cheaper, technology will be embedded into more and more of the products we buy.

As the video suggests, the information captured on these items will not simply be isolated to the devices themselves, but rather they will be communicable to the environment around them using wireless technology.

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