(From the University of Delaware) Article by Kelly April Tyrrell Photos by Kathy F. Atkinson
In the era of big data come big questions about how to use it. These questions and more were the backdrop of the recent Consumer Analytics and Industry Applications conference, put on by the University of Delaware’s Institute for Financial Services Analytics IFSA.“
We are living in a big data world,” said IFSA director and professor of business administration, Bintong Chen. The institute is a collaboration between UD’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, the College of Engineering and JPMorgan Chase.
The motivation behind IFSA’s second annual conference was to bring academic and industry minds together for discussion about how to turn massive tomes of digital information into actionable strategies for marketing, streamlining business and serving consumers.About 60 people — industry representatives and UD faculty and students — gathered last month at Lerner Hall.
Four speakers offered their perspective. They included Jason Van Hulse, lead manager of the centralized transaction operations business modeling and analytics team at JPMorgan Chase; Chitra Dorai, IBM Distinguished Engineer and Master Inventor; Raj Venkatesan, Bank of America Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business; and David Schweidel, associate professor of marketing in the Goizueta Business School of Emory University.
Lerner College Dean Bruce Weber helped open the conference. He noted that academic and industry interest in big data has “skyrocketed.” The university’s vice provost for research, Charles Riordan, chose another word: exploded.Riordan, a chemist recently elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, noted how applicable the field is to many different disciplines and how powerful it can be.
For instance, big data allowed for the sequencing of the human genome. It was a project that came in $300 million under budget and was completed two years earlier than expected. Sequencing is now vastly cheaper than it once was thanks to the wealth of data available and the technology inspired by it.
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via UD Consumer Analytics and Industry Applications conference discusses big data.
