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The rush is on. With data mining techniques
developed at NCSA, companies are discovering
valuable nuggets of information buried in
mountains of data.
Data are piling up -- in company files, in government databases, in scientific labs. Doubling every 20 months, by some estimates. When NASA's Earth Observing System swings into operation by the end of this decade, it will transmit more than two terabytes of data -- the equivalent of two million books -- to Earth daily. At that rate, a single day's worth of data will occupy a researcher for several years. Wal-Mart, the merchandising giant, records more than 20 million sales transactions each day. Every swipe of your credit card or beep of the checkout scanner adds more bits to business's cache of sales data. With this exponential growth in data, the "information at our fingertips" -- forecast by Bill Gates -- has too often meant a flood of data rather than a stream of knowledge. Data mining tools and techniques being developed at NCSA are helping change that. These algorithms and techniques are not only expanding the realms of science, but through projects with the center's industrial partners, but also strengthening the economy. These data mining tools are finding innovative applications in marketing, sales analysis, fraud detection, quality control, and investments, to name a few.
Like sunlight breaking through morning fog, these tools are
uncovering patterns and detecting trends slumbering in data.
The tools are, quite simply, turning information into knowledge
and data into dollars.
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