Techweek Wednesday: It’s about Big Data

Count on a big data expert like Jonathan Wagner to have, well, big data. Like 8 billion. That’s roughly how many Internet-connected devices he says inhabit the planet.

Fast forward five years and, Wagner says, that number grows to 200 billion. And it’s not just more smartphones and tablets.

“It’s going to be your car, your house, your entire city,” said Wagner, who is slated to speak on “Internet of Things: Sensors and Networks” during Wednesday’s first day of the Big Data Summit at Techweek in Kansas City.

Kansas City is well on its way to embedding sensors to gather information it says will help it run the city and provide services more efficiently and less expensively.

Wagner said one of the benefits of Internet-connected devices is the ability to connect across any distance using remote computer servers, or the cloud, rather than setting up thousands of individual networks.

He explained with a small demonstration using robotics.

The big data impact comes from having the information those billions of Internet-connected gadgets can pump out. A constant flow of data points about traffic, health care outcomes, energy usage and much more.

Add that information to the troves of data generated already at hospitals, workplaces, city halls, schools and elsewhere.

“Big data is all the information we store electronically that in the past was too difficult to analyze because of its vastness,” said Don Peterson, a Kansas City area businessman behind the city’s two-day Big Data Summit.

Now, we have the tools to pull data together and look into the vastness to find trends, to learn what works and what doesn’t, to alert us to what needs attention.

Cerner Corp., based in North Kansas City, offers a good example. Its business focuses on setting up electronic medical records systems for hospitals. Each patient’s information is there to help doctors, nurses and other caregivers deliver better care.

Big data looks at millions of records, ignoring individual cases to see how well different choices in health care treatments work or how factors that vary across populations change outcomes. Cerner calls it Population Health.

Though this is Techweek’s debut in Kansas City, the Big Data Summit is holding its third round. It moved up its schedule by two months to become an event within Techweek, posting its own schedule and hosting its own website.

The summit’s origins began with Peterson who built a smaller periodic gathering of local folks interested in big data, a meet-up group. He turned it into the annual event, backed by sponsors such as Kansas City-based DST Systems Inc., to help attract out-of-town speakers and larger audiences. Hundreds attended last November’s summit.

Wednesday’s Big Data Summit schedule includes panels and speakers from Intel Corp., Cloudera, IBM, Sprint, DST, BIME Analytics, and mySidewalk which formerly was called MindMixer.

Other Techweek events Wednesday include an afternoon panel discussion with angel investors presented by Digital Sandbox, another evening happy hour event and a exhibit on drones at Bunker Labs. Events require registration with Techweek.

This story was originally published September 15, 2015 at 5:33 PM with the headline "Techweek Wednesday: It’s about Big Data."