Business Wire recently announced the formation of a Big Data Working Group that would undertake to solve security related issues with big data.

What is big data? The term was eloquently explained at a recent Amrita workshop, using an example.

“There are over 3 million records collected of patients who received treatment at the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences. The hospital has its own picture archival and communication system, PACS. Over 23 terra bytes of data resides in its servers. So big data is a topic that is extremely important to us at Amrita.”

Dr. Sreeranga Rajan, Director of Software Systems Innovation at Fujitsu, and adjunct faculty at Amrita had helped convened the workshop, and the SecurIT conference, that followed. Now Dr. Sreeranga is overseeing Amrita’s participation in research efforts to secure big data.

Dr. Sreeranga will lead the efforts of the Big Data Working Group, together with Neel Sundaresan of eBay and Wilco Van Ginkeo of Verizon.

In the Business Wire article, Dr. Sreeranga explained, “By collaborating as a global community of thought leaders and researchers, we are not only looking to help the industry overcome challenges, but also leverage new opportunities for monitoring and detection of security threats enabled by big data.”

In a recent visit to India and Amrita, Dr. Sreeranga commented specifically on Amrita’s participation in the global initiative.

“Amrita has a lot of data already collected in the area of health care. We will establish a test platform here for experimenting and establishing algorithms. Because Amrita can host this data platform and a state-of-the-art framework, researchers will be able to study and gain insights.”

“Doctors in India, on an average, see larger numbers of patients daily, as compared to doctors in the West. We have massive data sets here, which gives us an advantage. Studying this data can also help in improving services. The more data we crunch, the more we can know where we are lacking.”

“We will have Machine Learning Models, which is an upcoming area of research today. The models make sense out of history, and then predict what’s coming next.”

“We envision that there perhaps will be no other place where a researcher can go, to gain so much. Amrita students will also benefit greatly by being exposed to this kind of research in both security and machine learning. Doctoral students will help build the platform by running test cases with various data sets.”

October 4, 2012
Health Sciences Campus, Kochi