70 Percent Organizations will Shift Focus from Big to Small and Wide Data by 2025
According to a Gartner prediction, 70 percent of organizations will shift their focus from Big Data to small and wide data, by 2025, providing more context for analytics and making artificial intelligence (AI) less data hungry.
“Disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic is causing historical data that reflects past conditions to quickly become obsolete, which is breaking many production AI and machine learning (ML) models,” said Jim Hare, distinguished Research Vice President at Gartner.
Data and analytics leaders need to turn to new analytics techniques known as “small data” and “wide data”. Taken together they are capable of using available data more effectively, either by reducing the required volume or by extracting more value from unstructured, diverse data sources.
Small data is an approach that requires less data but still offers useful insights. The approach includes certain time-series analysis techniques or few-shot learning, synthetic data, or self-supervised learning.
Wide data enables the analysis and synergy of a variety of small and large, unstructured, and structured data sources. It applies X analytics, with X standing for finding links between data sources, as well as for a diversity of data formats. These formats include tabular, text, image, video, audio, voice, temperature, or even smell and vibration.
Facebook Expands Covid-19 Announcement Tool to India
Facebook has expanded its Covid-19 Announcement in India, which is a tool for the health departments of States and Union Territories to share essential Covid-19 related updates with their communities. This is part of Facebook’s ongoing efforts to support the public health authorities’ work to keep people safe and informed during the corona-virus public health crisis. India is the second country after the US to launch this feature. The company has partnered with 33 states and Union Territories to roll this out in their respective jurisdictions.
Facebook Covid-19 Announcements can be used to communicate:
- Information on existing COVID-19 resources, such as helplines
- Updates on hospital bed availability in districts, such as Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds and oxygen supported beds
- Changes to existing COVID-19 rules and regulation that can impact communities and day-to-day actions, such as lockdowns, night curfews and changes to treatment protocols
- Information about vaccine eligibility and registration, and the logistics of acquiring a vaccine
- Accurate information on COVID-19 appropriate behavior
- Preventive behavioral health measures to stop the spread of COVID-19
Microsoft to Retire Internet Explorer in June 2022
Microsoft is finally retiring its original Internet browser—the Internet Explorer. After a life cycle of over 25 years, the desktop application for Internet Explorer will be ‘retired on 15 June 2022 and it will no longer receive support services from the company either. The company is encouraging users to shift to Microsoft Edge instead, which has legacy support for Internet Explorer-based websites built in.
While the effective end of life for Internet Explorer had happened last year, it still allowed users to use Explorer with limited functions. Microsoft announced last year that the web app for Microsoft Teams will stop working on Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) from 30 November. Additionally, services included in Microsoft 365, such as Outlook and OneDrive, will stop connecting to IE11 from 17 August 2021.
