At MeriTalk’s webinar on Preparing for the Federal Data Deluge, big data experts said that data storage and protection, which includes managing data centers, is a balancing act that only gets harder as the amount of data increases. […]

With the implementation of a robust Geographic Information Services (GIS) to provide mapping and analysis services, the city continues to further “smart city” and IoT initiatives across the nation. […]

Jon Froehlich at the University of Maryland is working with a team of graduate students on Project Sidewalk, an online tool through which users can view their Washington, D.C., neighborhoods with Google Street View and label areas that may be inaccessible to those with impaired mobility. […]

The Cloud Security Alliance published a list of the 100 Best Practices in Big Data Security and Privacy to help big data service providers strengthen their infrastructures as the amount of data rapidly grows. The list offers 10 solutions for each of the 10 biggest challenges in big data security and privacy. Check out our condensed list, presenting one recommendation for each challenge. […]

Purdue University’s Forecast app, which was released in March, uses data analysis to help students do well in school and maintain healthy habits. […]

Working with private companies to manipulate big data is no small task, according to David Green, Program Manager for Disaster Applications at NASA. […]

Hitachi announced the creation of a data management system and technology for parallel data processing that, when tested, increased the speed of data analytics by up to 100 times. […]

The General Services Administration recently launched its new big data management platform, Data to Decisions, to address and accomplish open data and transparency goals. […]

Campaign managers who urge politicians that they have a certain state’s unwavering support can now use data analytics to detect cities and even individuals within those states who may not back the candidates. […]

Lillian Ingster, director of the National Death Index (NDI), has access to the entire universe of death data in the United States since 1979. Ingster shares her experience managing this data with her Federal peers as often as she can. […]

Six hundred people have registered for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity Multi-View Stereo 3D Mapping Challenge, which was announced on July 1. The Mapping Challenge invites people to submit 3-D maps created from IARPA’s vast data sets, most of which come from satellite images. […]

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Big Data Project last spring transferred a big data set from Next-Generation Radar to the cloud platforms of Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Open Cloud Consortium. Now, the members of NOAA’s BDP are trying to compile and present more big data sets in a clear and accessible way. […]

David Meza, chief knowledge architect at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Johnson Space Center, is trying to find a way to share visual data so that a NASA employee at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida can log in to a computer and see what Meza and his team have been working on in their Texas-based studio. This project to streamline visualization tools falls under a broader initiative to link the agency, especially in regard to big data. […]

Students are directed to go online for schoolwork, and corporations are reaping the benefits by subjecting these students to targeted marketing. The National Education Policy Center’s 18th Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercialism Trends examines how “the policies that enable and encourage these practices connect today’s children and adolescents to monitoring and to marketers.” […]

The size of the digital universe will grow to 176 zettabytes by 2025 – leading to a future of machine learning. James Harris, CTO, Defense Intelligence Agency, and Jason Matheny, Director, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, joined Defense One on a live webcast on how the future of digital information will intersect with the future of intelligence collection and analysis. […]

The government wants to be better, and technology is the way to get there, President Obama told a crowd at the South by Southwest festival in Austin. The president emphasized the need for the government to advance in its use of technology in order to better serve its people. […]

The Department of Defense continues to push forward with efforts to bolster its IT system. The Army awarded a $5 billion Information Technology Enterprise Solutions 3 Hardware contract for IT hardware, software, and other services, to 17 companies. […]

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service has collaborated with the University of Montana and other organizations to use Google Earth Engine to create an interactive, online map tool that integrates layers of data to identify and pinpoint elusive species damaging western habitats. […]

“Some studies say that cruelty to animals is a precursor to larger crime,” so the FBI will now track animal cruelty in the same way it does armed assault, arson, burglary, and homicide. […]

To help agencies better understand the potential that big data holds for the larger Federal enterprise, MeriTalk chats with Steve Totman, a big data technology evangelist with New York City-based Cloudera, and Webster Mudge, senior director of technology solutions at Cloudera. […]

MeriTalk caught up with Andrew Friedrich, IBM’s Federal Big Data & Analytic Solutions Leader, at MeriTalk’s 2015 Big Data Brainstorm in Washington, D.C. […]

MeriTalk caught up with Murthy Mathiprakasam, principal product marketing manager for Informatica’s Big Data products, at the Nov. 19 Big Data Brainstorm in Washington, D.C. Although Federal agencies are sitting on a lot of data, a significant effort must be made to first prepare that data to be mined and analyzed. Listen to the podcast […]

Big data and new, emerging analytics capabilities hold great promise for government, from the ability of agencies to operate more efficiently to providing more timely, personalized services to citizens. But with the unprecedented amount of data that government agencies and private organizations are collecting about average Americans come very real dangers to personal privacy and […]

The Paris attacks did more than reveal the growing capabilities of the Islamic State to carry out attacks in the West; they revealed what some fear are chinks in America’s big data armor. In a world where everything seems to be connected digitally and everyone seemingly leaves behind traces of digital dust that can be […]

One day big data may be able to help forecast cyberattacks before they occur, panelists said at MeriTalk’s Second Annual Big Data Brainstorm on Thursday. “I think the opportunities of using big data for cyber defense are really enormous,” said Jason Matheny, director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). Using the digital signatures […]

Big data and analytics hold great promise for improving the performance of Federal agencies and services. But leveraging data to improve agency operations while also maintaining security is not always easy. MeriTalk recently talked to Webster Mudge, the senior director of technology solutions at Cloudera, about how the open-source enterprise data management company approaches big […]

Many senior-level Federal IT managers would like to use big data and think it could improve their missions, but only 16 percent have full-blown big data programs underway, according to a new survey from Unisys Corporation. The survey, conducted this summer by Beacon Technology Partners, was based on interviews with 100 Federal executives, split evenly […]