HOW CAN BIG DATA CHANGE THE WORLD?

Nowadays, we live in a technological globalized world where the company’s principal objectives are to manage efficiently the value of the company by increasing their income and reducing their cost and keeping their customers and bring new ones.

The most powerful tool that we have is what we call the s.XXI Oil, in other words, the Big Data

We all have probably heard about Big Data but by talking to people after investigating on it I’ve seen that some have a wrong idea about what Big Data really is and why is it so useful.

Some people have been saying: “Big Data is something I fear, I mean, there is no privacy so if this data is stolen…” The fact is that Big Data fills several billions of Gigabytes about endless things such as data generated my social networks, credit cards, phone calls, mobile data, satellite images…

Big Data not only is information about people, it also has plenty of information about how the environment in the world is going on like predicting floods due to the thaw of the poles, measures of the increment of CO2 in the atmosphere or even controlling affected areas by an epidemic illness or a plague and the population affected by it.

Now the main problem regarding the Big Data is “Which data is useful to analyse and how do we use it for our benefit or to help the world?” and answering this question will bring us the answer that everyone who owns a company asks to themselves:

“Who are my clients?”

“Which target am I aiming?”

“Why the customers choose me?”

“How do I stablish a relationship of fidelity with my clients?”

“How do I add value to my company?”

“In what should I invest?”

It’s said that only the 34% of all the data that we can get is stored, a 7% is analysed and a 1% is used. Knowing this we can tell that Big Data is still in an early stage where we still must improve during the years to make it mature.

Now that the basics of Big Data is introduced, I want to talk about how we can use Big Data in a macro vision instead of users giving information for a company to improve the value.

In humanitarian aid Big Data can be so useful, not only for the people but for the country’s economy. In Ethiopia for example, a company named Zensys Technologies worked with the Ministry of Health of Ethiopia to use the Big Data to determine which places should be vaccinated for the Measles (“Sarampión in Spanish”). Thanks to that, the size of the problem was not only reduced that the government saves more less $30 million.

UNICEF also uses Big Data to bring humanitarian aid to countries. Basically, what they do is to localize and monitor populations that need help and they bring the help almost in real time.

 The first time this was used was when there was an outbreak of Ebola in Africa and they took one year to solve the problem. The same method was used the next year when then Zika outbreak took place in Brazil.

We’ve seen that Big Data is also useful to solve problems related to countries even continents. But can Big Data contribute to help with the fight against the Climate Change? The answer is yes. That is why it’s said that Big Data is the new Oil, it has endless power to contribute to anything.

And helping in the fight against the climate change has more utilities apart than saving the world because 33% of the world’s GDP is affected by heavy changes in the weather and natural disasters such as wildfires, hurricanes, floods… and that’s a fact.

Imagine that we are able to calculate the levels of carbon emissions then calculate how does this affect to the greenhouse effect which will result to an increase in the mean temperature of the atmosphere that will derivate to the polar thaw that will cause an increase in the sea levels flooding areas that we can predict through maths and by predicting that countries can get ready by relocating the populated areas affected by the increase on the sea level.

Well, so you don’t have to imagine that because it’s happening nowadays.

Also, the power of Big Data is used for some countries, for example a start-up in Taiwan that uses Big Data to optimize the agricultural crop production in the country.

This company gathers data of the rice fields to improve the rice production and they do it thought sensors that monitor the rain, the temperature, chemical products… With this data they can predict droughts, floods, intoxications even plagues and anticipate to that before it happens to not lose part of the production.

In this article I wanted to explain a bit deeper what big data is and it’s further uses in the world such as the climate change or humanitarian aid, apart from improving the value of the companies that is something I guess it’s easier to know.

I hope you learnt something reading this article and that you have enjoyed the content I tried to express.

                                                                          Fernando Montero

Maria Fuster

Pablo Planas

Pere Crespo

Digital Analytics 2019