 It's The Cube, here is your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are on the ground in downtown San Francisco at the Clifft Hotel at this Dell 1510 discussion forum on big data. It's the second in a series that they did. They did Boston on security, today was on big data and we were hosted today by Susan Etlanger from the Altimeter Group. Thank you for hosting. My pleasure. Kind of a raucous crowd. It was a raucous crowd, you know, there are a lot, no shortage of opinions today. So what did you think? You know, I think it was fascinating because we're in a room full of people who care passionately about technology so unsurprisingly you get a lot of opinions that are informed by passionate love of technology but big data is a complicated topic. And it was a good conversation, I thought you did a pretty good job kind of roping everything in because like you said, there's a lot of people with a lot of opinions so you know, sometimes people went kind of crazy but that was the point, right? That's what we're trying to do. We like a little controlled chaos. So in preparing to come to this, I watched your TED talk that you did last year and congratulations, it was a great talk and there were some really interesting themes I wanted to follow up with you so I'm glad you stopped by. And one of them was really about, you know, we talk about the data but I just want to grab what you said was that it's really about the importance of critical thinking that without context what is the data? And you know, having a broad base of information, a broad base of social skills, a broad base of education are the things that people aren't talking about enough to add context. Yeah, I think, I mean it's a really interesting conundrum because when you think about big data it really is about technology from a technologist's perspective and we talk about how we process it and we talk about how we store it and we talk about how we share it and all these other things but what makes big data interesting or this idea that we call big data which is sort of an imperfect name for it is that it could potentially give us the potential to understand a little bit about the world that we live in so whether it's ourselves as citizens, ourselves as patients, ourselves as consumers that's kind of where it could go but we really talk about it in a very technology centric way. Yeah, and it doesn't seem like people talk enough about the context and enough about little fun things, you know, how do I have statistics, you know, change the scale on the XY axis and the slope of the curve looks really flat or really steep and so there's a lot of these kind of softer issues that I don't know get enough attention or are we just not far enough down the path or that will come, what do you think? Yeah, I don't think they're softer. I mean I think if you think about what big data is and the way that Gartner describes it, a lot of it comes from human expression, human speech, imagery, things like that and there's really no technology today that will take an image and tell you the meaning of that image, you know, we're further along with language but even when you think about language there are arguably a thousand languages in the world and even if you think about maybe say the top 100 or the top 50 from a business point of view words mean different things in different contexts and so this is why it's important when you think about big data that to understand a lot of it is unstructured meaning it just comes like a tweet or a poster, a blog poster, a news story or a chat log in a call center, it's just the way people communicate and pulling the meaning out is actually more complicated than you think. Yeah, it's my favorite example of kind of context is Saturday Night Live, right? Everything they say on Saturday Night Live is so politically uncorrected if you set it on almost any other forum you get in trouble but if you say the same words on Saturday Night Live, same words, everyone knows the context, it's a spoof, it's a farce, it's funny and it's taken as comedy as it's intended to be taken and it seems like that nuance is so so important just does not seem to be a big part of the conversation. It is, I mean if you think about for example a tweet, it's 140 characters and so constantly people are just getting themselves in trouble on Twitter. If you think about an article, a news story or an article or even an opinion piece, you have a little bit more time to upset everybody in your audience. Speaking of pieces, so I know you've got some new research out recently about what are we doing with this big data, give us a little update on what you did and what some of your findings. The thing I've been really focused on and the thing I'm gonna continue to focus on for the remainder of the year and probably the rest of my natural life is how do we extract insight from data in a real way, not just like somebody's age and how many times they went to the store and how many times they bought detergent and what could that possibly mean about them but actually real insights about people's propensity to buy, to be well, to get sick, to vote a certain way, to do all sorts of other things and so the insight piece is really important because it means that we have to think that business people need to think in a more sort of computational way to be able to communicate with technologists and technologists need to think in a more business oriented way so the insight is really important and then the other piece is how do we do that in a way that actually engenders trust? You're right, the trust issue came up a lot today and kind of this trade off between privacy and trust and giving me enough information in one of the younger people in the audience that I actually want to give you more information so you can give me better suggestions so it's certainly not settled by any stretch of the imagination and kind of the trade off of value for privacy too I think is very different based on generations and people's experience today. Or maybe just time of, you know, time of the day, time of life, where you are so if I'm walking down the street, you know, I sort of maybe expect there might be a camera there if I'm in a restroom, I may not expect there to be a camera there if I'm shopping in the grocery store, yeah, exactly, back to context or like, you know, you think about teenagers, teenagers want tons of privacy. I mean, it's hard being a teenager. You know, you get into your 20s, maybe you want different kinds of information, different kinds of, you have different expectations so we have to kind of figure that out. Except the clown teenagers share more stuff than anybody and they shouldn't be sharing so tell your kids, be careful what they share. Because they're on Snapchat and everything's going away, right? Oh, that's right, supposedly right. So Susan, thanks for moderating the panel. Thanks for taking a few minutes with us. Good luck with the, how do they get the report? Oh, you can just go to altimetergroup.com and download it there. Okay, awesome. So thanks again. I'm Jeff Rick. We're on the ground at the Clifton Hotel in San Francisco at the Dell 1510 Big Data Discussion. Thanks for watching theCUBE.