Courtesy of NECN

 Peter Howe, Cambridge, Mass.) - Among the hottest cutting-edge growth industries these days is a sprawling field increasingly known as "Big Data" - a set of technologies and software and analytical techniques to help a world awash in trillions of trillions of terabytes of data find ways to organize, visualize, analyze, and utilize all this information.

"The hour of Big Data has arrived in Massachusetts," Governor Deval L. Patrick said Wednesday at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology event where he and top MIT and Intel Corp. leaders unveiled several new initiatives:


- A $12.5 million, five-year commitment by Intel to fund a new Big Data research and study operation at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, being dubbed bigdata@CSAIL

- A new Patrick-created Big Data Consortium, to be run through the quasi-public Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, which will provide matching grants for big-data projects and internships

- A new joint venture between the Governor's Council for Innovation to work with the Big Data Consortium on ways to use data analytics to improve delivery of government programs and services.


The Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council estimates that there are today over 100 Big Data-oriented companies in the state employing more than 12,000 people, and 58,000 more people doing Big Data work in fields like health care, life sciences and financial services running efforts to take billions or trillions of pieces of information coming from computerized transaction and research efforts to try to answer big questions.

One small example of Big Data at work: An MIT CSAIL effort to map the locations of potholes in Cambridge through accelerometers mounted in cars sending back data when they hit a pothole. A bigger example could be using tracking signals sent from hundreds of thousands of cellphones in cars on highways across Massachusetts to sketch pictures of when, where and why traffic jams form, to show engineers what are the worst traffic bottlenecks that most need to be fixed.

In another application, Big Data analysts have discovered that identifying a combination of dozens of pieces of financial information from the financial transaction records of millions of homeowners could identify far more accurately who was at likely of defaulting on their mortgage and going into foreclosure than standard barometers used within the banking industry.

In each case, the guiding principle is figuring out how to take advantage of corralling and analyzing trillions of pieces of discrete information to answer a big-picture question that, often, has never been answered before, or never answered with clarity.

"Big data is poised to be the next major technological wave, and Massachusetts is well positioned to take the lead," said Mass. TLC Chief Executive Tom Hopcroft. "The governor's initiative will add a powerful force to our dynamic mix of established players, start-ups, customers, researchers and investors."

With videographer Kevin Krisak.