Much of the talk around Big Data centers on big business in the generic sense, in its marketing and on security issues. Vin Sharma, director of strategy and product, Big Data Analytics for Intel, reminds us that Big Data can have a huge impact on the sciences, as well as agriculture, medicine and other industries.

“Imagine things that we’ve taken for granted in a variety of sciences — linguistics, history, archaeology — or anything industry being transformed by our ability to collect data and aggregate it in a central location,” Sharma told Jeff Frick, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during MIT CDO Forum West, sponsored by SAP and Intel. “Whether it’s through a data center or a cloud, imagine turning that data into insights that overturn what is currently understood in that science or industry. That is the value in Big Data analytics.”

The power of real-time data

Frick brought up a story in a film about Big Data that kicked off the conference about the way hospitals monitor premature infants.

“Even though hospitals have sophisticated equipment that monitors heartbeat and blood pressure, until recently, that data went onto the floor,” said Frick. “Now we have the ability to collect that stream of data in real time and do the analysis to find out when important things happen.”

Sharma responded: “We used to not think about or question the way hospitals treated patients. And you assume that pharmaceutical companies have a certain efficacy that they are looking for when they develop drugs. Imagine being able to use sensor-driven data to predict the efficacy of a drug. You would have greater accuracy when analyzing data.”

With its power to provide detailed information in real time, Big Data will have a huge impact on medical science. “We have yet to start on a very fruitful journey of not only electing data, but combining it into models and using advanced algorithms and analytics to decipher the patterns inside them,” said Sharma. “So there’s a lot more to come.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of MIT CDO West.

Photo by SiliconANGLE