April 14, 2021, 5:00 – 6:00PM

Abstract

The 2010s were arguably been the decade of data, with “big data“ becoming bigger, data-driven decision making becoming a corporate imperative, data analytics becoming the hot new degree, data being called a natural resource, and data scientist being awarded the dubious title of “sexiest job of the 21st century.” In many ways, the focus on data was just the next logical and inevitable stage in the evolution of information technology; it required the previous stages and it will provide the foundation for future evolution. In this talk, a quick history of the past six decades of IT will be reviewed with a focus on the digitization of data and the creation of new data by-products. A brief detour will be a discussion of technology projections made in 1995, including what happened, what happened much later than projected, what was projected that didn’t happen, and what happened that was largely unforeseen. The talk will resume with examples of current and emerging use and creation of data and will conclude with a view of future possibilities for the current decade, technical and non-technical issues that may accelerate or delay the possibilities, and some musings on methods to defend first-principals driven methods from displacement by purely data-driven approaches.

Speaker:

Brenda Lynn Dietrich Arthur and Helen Geoffrion Professor of Practice in the School of Operations Research. Member of Board of Trustees for the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. Member, Governing council of the NAE, Member of the National Research Council Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy Previously, in her 33 years of distinguished career at IBM, Dr. Dietrich served in many leadership roles, including: – Head of the Mathematical Sciences function in the IBM Research division. – IBM Fellow in 2007, and Vice President in 2008 – Chief Technology Officer and Strategist for IBM’s Business Analytics group.