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There’s a huge amount of data people generate with technology that is difficult to manage. New approaches are required to uncover the golden nuggets of insight and knowledge needed to effectively make decisions, create and do business.
To address this challenge, British tech company Decoded have developed an innovative machine learning algorithm called the Oracle, which can analyze big data and make predictions. The Oracle was presented at the Cannes Lions Festival, in France, and used to predict this year’s winners.
Cannes Lions recognizes and awards the most exciting creative ideas across 17 categories, covering everything from traditional print and film communications to technology and product design. According to Olly Rees, the Communications Strategist for Decoded, the Oracle’s predications were close to 100% accurate.
“We got hold of the last ten years of Cannes data, as well as live and historical social data – things like Twitter sentiment and Youtube views. By combining these data sets together, and analysing the results, our Oracle was able to reveal hidden truths.”
The Oracle also revealed some of the pitfalls of machine data analysis. For instance, a post on Twitter will have 140 characters or less, and so is unlikely to use language in the same way as a friendly conversation or a lengthy review. Thus, a positive tweet could have a different meaning altogether; and technology, alone, can’t always make the correct inference.
Rees explained that if you are going to analyse data to measure the success of an advertising campaign, for example, it’s essential to understand the processes involved, and then use the machine collected data in a critical way to make sense of it.
Although the winners in each of the festival’s categories were predicted using machine learning and live data analysis, the two data scientists working with the Oracle played a crucial role as “storytellers,” in order to derive meaningful insights.
Ultimately, the Oracle showed that machine collected data is most powerful when combined with human ingenuity, and placed in the context of a human narrative.
Today, data science skills are in great demand by organisations around the world. Decoded have developed the Oracle and the Data in a Day workshop to demonstrate what is possible with the latest data analysis techniques.
“We believe that by having knowledge of what’s possible empowers individuals to make more informed and more accurate decisions about how their data is being collected and analysed – and whether any insights really can be identified.”
FUTURE IMPLICATIONS
Big data is at the forefront of most organisations today. One of the greatest challenges we face is analysing it effectively. From the dawn of time to about a decade ago mankind generated about 5 exabytes of data. According to Intel, in 2012, global data grew to 2.2 zettabytes that’s 500 times more data than all the data ever generated prior to 2003, and it will grow 3 times that size by 2015.
As the Oracle demonstrates, understanding data will help us to make accurate predictions, and a company that has the right analytical skills to do this will have access to very valuable insights that otherwise would be overlooked in all the noise and contradiction.
About the author
Massimo Barbato is a writer and commentator on AI and future technologies in the British press and media. His focus is on how we can build a better world. www.artificial-intelligence.org.uk/
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