A new big data analytic tool being developed by computer scientists at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) will help businesses make sense, in real time, of the deluge of data that streams at them like water from a fire hose.
With a three-year, $499,753 grant from the National Science Foundation, Elke Rundensteiner, professor of computer science and director of WPI’s Data Science Program, is leading a team of computer science and data science students that is building a next-generation event trend analysis tool known as SETA (Scalable Event Trend Analytics). This open-source software will be used not just to find patterns in real-time, high-volume data streams (“data in motion”), but to analyze those patterns and make sense of them on the fly for just-in-time decision making.
SETA could enable large businesses, social media sites, fraud detection centers, autonomous vehicle networks, governments, and other users to harness the continuous flow of big data as it streams in and transform it into actionable insights that could allow them to be increasingly responsive and competitive. “In a world where big data is continuously accelerating in volume and velocity, real-time streaming data analysis has become increasingly critical,” said Rundensteiner, an internationally recognized expert in scalable data stream processing.