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Jared Dean – Have you ever wondered how your Netflix account knows exactly what movies to recommend? Or how Amazon can keep you continually buying random things you never thought you needed? Or how those Facebook ads are always eerily targeted directly at you? Well the answer is simple, Big Data.  Ok – maybe it’s not simple, but it is something we can understand and even harness to make a difference in our lives and in our organizations or industries.

This week we speak with Jared Dean, author of the new book, Big Data, Data Mining, and Machine Learning. This book was recently ranked the #1 “Big Data Read of the Summer” by The Hive. Jared Dean is a Senior Director of Research and Development at SAS. He is responsible for the development of SAS’ worldwide data mining solutions. This includes customer engagements, new feature development, technical support, sales support, and product integration. Prior to joining SAS, Dean worked as a mathematical statistician for the US Census Bureau. He holds an MS degree in computational statistics from George Mason University.

“Innovation is largely incremental.  Most of the time we are making small steps forward, not giant leaps.  “

– Jared Dean

Quotes from Jared:

[shadowbox]”We enable companies to answer their business problems by letting machines use algorithms to find patterns.”

“The goal is to get rid of all the excess data to get down to the few points that tell you something valuable.”

“I have tried to automate myself out of a job.  Anytime I have to do something 3 or 4 times I want to figure out a way to make a computer do it.”

“The amount of data in the world is growing at a huge rate.  Ninety percent of all the world’s data is less than 2 years old.”[/shadowbox]

What we learn in this episode:

• Can you accurately predict the NFL by using Big Data?
• How do outliers play a key role in data analysis?
• Is there a difference between an algorithm and an equation?
• How do the self driving cars from Google use Big Data to operate?

Resources:

Big Data, Data Mining, and Machine Learning

http://support.sas.com/publishing/authors/dean.html

Twitter @JaredLDean

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