What do IBM, DARPA, and reality-TV’s Big Brother have in common ?
IBM, DARPA, and many of the current catch of reality TV shows are all interested in "stream computing".
DARPA had it’s LifeLog project to "captures, stores, and makes accessible the flow of one person’s experience". Whereas the TV series takes a 3-4 month slice of time for a group of people. The amount of data from these systems is massive and storing and post processing all of it is not really the point, especially when you consider that processing the stream would allow you to "focus" the capture process and make analysis and on-going objective. This is were IBM comes in.
IBM has been working on "stream computing" for the past 5 years. What first caught my attention was the "SmartBay" Environmental Monitoring System Installed in Galway Bay. The project is deploying advanced ocean sensors to collect and transmit real time information.
You can imagine using traditional analytics where data is captured and clustered into data cubes for processing. Once processed and analyzed, there would be a report and a series of recommendations. One of those would be of the form, "If we had had X data, we would have changed Y." this is where stream computing has the advantage.
“The beauty of SmartBay is that, for the first time in history, we can monitor a wide range of ocean conditions on a twenty-four hour basis … This opens up a wide range of possibilities for early warning systems for pollution, the study of fish and shellfish stocks, the prediction of harmful algal blooms, dangerously high waves and even the long term shifts in ocean conditions" – James Ryan
You can read more about Stream Computing here and the SmartBay project here.
