“Turning Big Data into Actionable Information,” the August 12 SmartEdge presentation sponsored by the Polis Center, featured Mansour Raad with Esri. He reviewed tools that allow users to aggregate at spatial, temporal and attribute levels billions of records to be analyzed and visualized in non-traditional way. In addition, Raad demonstrated the application, GeoStatistics, to turn Big Data into actionable information in the space of Smart Cities, IoT, Telematics, Automotive, Insurance, Health Care, Advertisement and Telco. To watch the presentation, click here.

Raad noted, “Some say that Big Data is about Volume, Velocity, Variety. I say it is more about ‘when the traditional means are failing you.’ You know you are in a Big Data realm when the data is not very large, not coming at you very fast and is structured, but the window of opportunity to respond to it with intelligence requires non-traditional means.” He points out, “Today, most of this Big Data comes attached with a specific location in the form of geographical coordinates or implicitly in the form of an internet address or a tweet  e.g. ‘I’m eating a Chicago style pizza in downtown Boston.’”

With over 25 years of experience in the IT/GIS field, Raad is the lead Big Data Subject Matter Expert at Esri as a Cloudera certified Hadoop developer and HBase specialist.  In this role, he often assists commercial and government customers in implementing Big Data geospatial solutions. He has performed as team lead in architecting and implementing product solutions for ArcGIS. Raad  earned a Master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering from Boston University and frequently blogs on Big Data topics and examples of Geospatial implementations at https://thunderheadxpler.blogspot.com.