“Cloud & big data: the perfect marriage?” was the title of the talk given by Patrick Valduriez, senior researcher at French institute Inria and its scientific manager for Latin America, which was held on 16th October 2014 at CMM. The conference focused on the benefits and risks that the combination of cloud and big data brings.
“The talk was of great interest for the researchers from CMM. It showed the evolution of massive data in the last decades and how this presents relevant opportunities for the development of new mathematical models and algorithms to manage large amount of information”, stressed Héctor Ramírez, CMM researcher who organized the event.
Valduriez explained that big data aims at added value and operational performance, whereas cloud targets flexibility and reduced cost. “The ability to produce high-value information and knowledge from big data makes it critical for many applications such as decision support, forecasting, business intelligence, research and data-intensive science”, pointed out the French scientist.
However, these benefits require that organizations outsource complex tasks, such as system administration or application development, to very large data centers operated by cloud providers. Thus, Besides data privacy, another problem that arises in this context is the dependence on these technology providers.
In Valduriez opinion, enforcing regulation at Internet scale is crucial. He highlighted two strategies that could impose guarantees by cloud providers on costumer data: one is the requirement of transparency about where the data is store, and the other is balancing their power in order to limit dominant positions, promoting the interoperability between cloud providers through standard protocols or open source software.
“What Mr. Valduriez said opens challenges in both infrastructure and human resources. So that these applications give results, users (in our case, engineers) who know how to use these frameworks are needed”, highlighted Juan Carlos Maureira, CMM scientist.
Patrick Valduriez has recently been awarded the “2014 Inria-Académie des Science-Dassault Systems Innovation Prize”, which honors innovative scientific contributions to computer science, mathematics and development of the digital world.
Inria-Chile works with researchers in Chile and France. It was established in partnership with the University of Chile, among eight others universities in Chile, in order to be a strategic innovation partner.
