9 applications and examples of Big Data in society

Nowadays, we live in the world of information. Every second, millions and millions of data are generated and stored by different corporations for future exploitation.

There are many examples of big data applications in multiple sectors. Today we bring 9 of them, to demonstrate that big data is everywhere, even if we do not see it at first glance.

Its uses are increasing and as the years go by, more people will be needed who have knowledge of managing massive amounts of data.

Big data technologies are widely used in the biomedical world. Knowing how to manipulate information well and draw conclusions is very important to obtain more precise diagnoses and be able to create predictive models for the detection of possible diseases that may appear in the future.

Another use is the study of pandemics and epidemics. Thanks to big data we can know how these pandemics will evolve and be prepared at the level of infrastructure and medicines to control them.

Big data also plays an important role in generating new drugs from computational models. Thanks to a database of chemical molecules, drug design processes can be accelerated and new ones generated that are more effective and have fewer side effects.

Particle research centers, such as CERN, located in Geneva, generate millions and millions of collisions within particle accelerators. All these collisions are stored on hard drives. This information is then analyzed to draw conclusions and find new particles never seen before.

The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) generates a petabyte of data every second. This makes the use of big data technologies mandatory to be able to handle so much data.

Business intelligence or better known as business intelligence (BI) is a group of methodologies that use data generated in the business to optimize performance and improve revenue.

The data generated is stored in data warehouses or data lakes and is later visualized with tools such as Power BI or Tableau.

The different graphics created allow you to make decisions that improve and optimize business processes. It is a fundamental part of any company that wants to grow and improve day by day.

Big data is very useful to predict the sales that are generated in a specific period of time. To carry out this task, if they use sales data generated in previous periods and using artificial intelligence techniques, highly accurate predictive models can be created.

The greater the amount of information used to generate the model, the more accurate it will be.

This allows businesses not to spend more money than necessary and generate the number of products that will be sold.

Cars that are capable of driving autonomously have been trained with big data to be able to learn how to drive and how to avoid accidents.

In addition, these cars are equipped with different sensors such as GPS, lidar technology and others that allow information to be sent to the company's servers in real time, improving the capabilities of autonomous cars, becoming increasingly safer.

Social networks such as Facebook, Instagram or YouTube store in their data warehouses all the information on user behavior: their location, their navigation, the images they look at, etc. This allows the social network to show the content and advertisements that the user wants to see, increasing satisfaction and therefore the number of company income.

Big data is also widely used in marketing. Platforms like Facebook Ads have information from millions and millions of users. This allows marketing agencies to generate specialized ads for a specific type of client.

All this information has to be analyzed, managed and stored by companies like Facebook using many of the big data technologies that currently exist.

The large amount of information accessible by intelligence and security teams makes it possible to prevent many crimes before they occur. In countries like China, security cameras are installed that capture the movements of the inhabitants and store them. This helps detect criminal activities and suspicious movements.

Big data is also important for cybersecurity. Security problems in systems can be identified and solved in time before they are compromised.

For years now, all the movements of players in different sports such as tennis or soccer have been stored for later analysis. Player movement patterns are analyzed to optimize team performance and results.