Big Data: New Paradigm Or "Sound And Fury, Signifying Nothing"?

ABSTRACTThe Gartner's 2014 Hype Cycle released last August moves Big Data technology from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to the beginning of the Trough of Disillusionment when interest starts to wane as reality does not live up to previous promises. As the hype is starting to dissipate it is worth asking what Big Data (however defined) means from a scientific perspective: Did the emergence of gigantic corpora exposed the limits of classical information retrieval and data mining and led to new concepts and challenges, the way say, the study of electromagnetism showed the limits of Newtonian mechanics and led to Relativity Theory, or is it all just "sound and fury, signifying nothing", simply a matter of scaling up well understood technologies? To answer this question, we have assembled a distinguished panel of eminent scientists, from both Industry and Academia: Lada Adamic (Facebook), Michael Franklin (University of California at Berkeley), Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam), Eric Xing (Carnegie Mellon University), and Kai Yu (Baidu) will share their point of view and take questions from the moderator and the audience.