Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

ANALYTICS TO SOLVE SOCIAL PROBLEMS

One of the great promises of the future of analytics is the ability for it to help solve large-scale social problems that have previously been unsolvable. For example, will distributed analytics someday lead to a rapid cure for a new virus or diseases, as people begin to share more health analytics with one another? Will it be possible to provide early warning systems ahead of natural disasters using analytics that will save thousands of lives? Will data from sensors in the earth help us effectively manage and maintain our natural resources?

These types of applications may sounds a bit far fetched; however, the reality is that similar things are beginning to happen today. For example, a recent study by medical researchers at Harvard showed that data from Internet-based news and Twitter feeds was faster than traditional sources for detecting the onset and progression of the cholera epidemic in postearthquake Haiti that sickened almost half a million people.7 “When we analyzed news and Twitter feeds from the early days of the epidemic in 2010, we found they could be mined for valuable information on the cholera outbreak that was available up to two weeks ahead of surveillance reports issued by the government health ministry,” said Rumi Chunara, PhD, of the Informatics Program at Children’s Hospital Boston, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School, and the lead author of the study. “The techniques we employed eventually could be used around the ...