Information will have revolutionary effect on studies says academic

The world's population is processing and creating more information than ever before and the effect this will have on academia is expected to be far reaching according to an Edinburgh professor.

The ever increasing amount of data helps crime prevention and detection, allows business trends to be analysed, money transactions to be processed quicker and aids medical researchers seeking cures. 

Professor Alan Bundy at the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics said that a “remarkable intellectual revolution is happening all around us, but few people are remarking on it”.

Prof Bundy said stated it is “influencing research in nearly all disciplines, both in the sciences and the humanities”.

Alex Szalay, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University raised the issue of analysing such vast amounts of data. He said: “How to make sense of all these data? People should be worried about how we train the next generation, not just of scientists, but people in government and industry.”

A computer scientist at Berkeley College, Joe Hellerstein, described this new era of data information as the “industrial revolution of data”.

According to Alan Bundy, it allows researchers in all academic fields to “ask new kinds of questions and to accept new kinds of answers”.

In the field of science new forms of data management and collection have allowed researchers to analyse huge amounts of data.

Edinburgh is home to the national e-Science centre that looks at different ways of collecting and analysing data so large that the usual processing methods are too expensive. New complex processes of collecting sky data will allow astronomers to formulate new ideas, leading to the creation of the study of Astor-informatics.

This vast amount of data information has not only affected research and practice in the field of science. Legal reasoning systems are being created with the use of data to assist in decision making processes and the management of data within government roles is becoming increasingly important.

Google's chief economist stated that the role of statistician will be the “sexiest” job in the future. The information management industry is estimated at around $100 billion, growing at a rate of almost ten percent a year, with companies such as IBM and Microsoft spending vast amounts on data management. Statisticians are required not only to manage data but also to analyse it and give it meaning.