I was reading a special report in last week’s Economist called Data Data Everywhere and I am sure by the title you can gather it’s about data. More specifically it is about the abundance of data in our world and how since we now have all of this data we will need to start spending time making sense of it. Having a degree in Machine Learning this piqued my interest especially because Machine Learning techniques will be at the core of learning patterns and making sense of it all.
But more than just the idea of learning interesting things from large amounts of data, I was interested in the concept of how just having data can lead to interesting things; even unintentionally. In the special report they refer to an example of a social network for storing the energy consumption of each device in your home to monitor your energy footprint. In this example the intentional use of data is to keep track of what energy you use and see where you can cut back. But the unintentional use could be learning the life-time of certain devices and symptoms they show before they break down. The site owner may not have set out to learn that information, but through collection of data could then run learning algorithms to predict those sorts of things and then even sell it back to the device manufacturers.
This is what fascinates me. Just the idea of having data and either intentionally or not being able to learn things from it. I see AdSpeek providing some additional value beyond serving location-aware ads. AdSpeek could learn things like what direction most of your customers tend to approach your store from or what speed they are traveling, what the weather is like outside, what time of day most people are interested, how you gain repeat customers… These are just some of the things I have “thought” about I can’t wait to see the things I haven’t even considered.