Data science news

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India set to be data analytics hotbed 

India is well-positioned to be a global center for data analytics because of the huge number of IT graduates entering the labor market every year, said Andrew Milroy, vice president of Asia-Pacific ICT practice at Frost & Sullivan.

Data analytics is not new to the country’s IT scene, said Milroy, but the importance of utilizing such technology is only now growing worldwide as companies look to make sense of the deluge of data, particularly unstructured data. The insights gleaned then go into improving companies’ business agility, customer relationships and market predictions, he said.

Gartner: Top 10 strategic technology trends for 2013 

Delegates to the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Florida this week got a preview of the analyst firm’s “Top 10 strategic technology trends for 2013” presentation, with Gartner’s David Cearley saying “Consumerisation is the backdrop of the forces of much of these changes.”

From Cearley’s presentation, these are the top 10 strategic tech trends for 2013:

Mobile device battles
Consumerization
Mobile apps and HTML5
Personal cloud
The Internet of things
Hybrid IT and cloud computing
Strategic big data 
Actionable analytics 
Mainstream in-memory computing
Integrated ecosystems

ART OF PERFORMANCE: FAMOUS SPORTS MOMENTS GRAPHED 

  

The images you see here represent some of the best moments in sports history, while at the same time representing some of the best data visualization seen in a while. Not only do these graphics clearly and cleanly demonstrate the massive talent of the competitors in each varied sport, each also does it with a stylish and appropriate display for the data involved. For the information obsessed, these graphics truly prove that data can be beautiful.

Big data could transform staff management 

Big data will transform the way businesses develop the talent in their workforce over the next five years, according to analysts. Data analytics has the potential to help businesses make dramatic returns by managing their workforce more effectively, said human resources (HR) technology analyst Josh Bersin.

“This is the next big thing that is going to happen in HR,” he told delegates at the HR Tech Europe conference. Data analytics technologies have the potential to offer businesses insights into their employees that could have a real impact on company profits, the HR conference heard.

One insurance company, for example, had a policy of only hiring graduates from top schools, in the belief that this would help it maximize profits from the sales team.

Data analytics helped Obama win, says Mostashari (MD National Coordinator for health IT)   

Farzad Mostashari, MD, the national health IT coordinator, said that data and analytics played a critical role in the campaign and re-election of President Barack Obama – mirroring the growing importance of data in healthcare.

Data and analytics have transformed marketing, campaigning, and even baseball. “How is it possible for us to imagine a world where that power of data is not brought to bear on life and death, clinical care, on population health, and affirming the path that we are on with health IT and bringing data to life?” Mostashari said the morning  after the election at the Nov. 7 meeting of the federal advisory Health IT Policy Committee.