Griffith U’s big data: the truth is in the tweets  

It wasn’t hard predicting media interest when Bela Stantic nailed the election result but there are surprises in the other questions he can answer

The head of Griffith U’s School of Information and Comms Technology,

Professor Stantic  spoke last week on what he and colleagues are analysing and raised an issue that he struggles to understand.

Professor Stantic set out the extraordinary resources social media -Twitter and Instagram, Flicker and Facebook – provide for understanding the way we live now. And he explained, short of giving away research secrets, how algorithms analysing content and context of vast amounts of tweets and picture and posts can predict everything from psephology to food poisoning.

He did not make it sound exactly easy but he certainly set out what very big data can reveal.

But the puzzle his analyses do not explain is why take-up of the science is patchy. “Any company or institution that does not venture into big data analytics probably will not be competitive and struggle to survive,” he said,


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