Posts by: Benedikt Koehler
Since I’ve seen this beautiful color wheel visualizing the colors of Flickr images, I’ve been fascinated with large scale automated image analysis. At the German Market Research association’s conference in late April, I presented some analyses that went in the same direction (click to enlarge):
On the image above you can see the color [...]
“So, what’s the mood of America?”
Interface, 1994
One of the most fascinating novels so far on data-driven politics is Neal Stephenson’s and J. Frederick George’s “Interface“, first published in 1994. Although written almost 20 years ago, many of the technologies discussed in this book, would still be [...]
Here’s another update on the analysis of Wikipedia data for the presidential candidates. What’s quite interesting, the attention value vor Mitt Romney is almost at the same level where Barack Obama has been four years ago. And Barack Obama is exactly where John McCain has been 2008:
But one thing has changed: The elections [...]
Here’s an addition to my last post on using Wikipedia data to analyse attention for the US presidential elections 2012. Here’s another look at the interest not for the candidates’ Wikipedia pages but the general pages for the elections 2008 and 2012. Compared to the candidates’ pages, the attention for the general [...]
The last hours, I’ve seen a lot of tweets mentioning this great new algorithm by MIT professor Devavrat Shah. The UK Wired, The Verge, Gigaom, The Atlantic Wire and Forbes all posted stories on this fantastic discovery. And this has only been the weekend. Starting next week, there will [...]
One of the most interesting challenges of data science are predictions for important events such as national elections. With all those data streams of billions of posts, comments, likes, clicks etc. there should be a way to identify the most important correlations to make predictions about real-world behavior such as: going to the voting booth [...]
A very clear indicator that a topic is not only an ephemeral hype is when there will be a scientific journal for this new topic. This has just happened with Big Data as Liebert publishers just announced at the Strata conference the launch of their peer-reviewed journal “Big Data” for 2013. It will [...]
While preparing and arranging today’s meal – Penne al Forno con Polpettine – to be documented and posted on Instagram, I thought: Why not preparing and arranging a pasta network with the help of the Instagram API and the Gephi network visualization software. I did this before for many other things such as Chinese [...]
What I really love about Twitter is that everything they do seems to be data-based. They’re so data-driven, they even analyze the ingredients of their lunch to ensure everyone at the company is living a healthy lifestyle. So, the decision for Berlin as their German headquarter cannot be a random or value-based decision. [...]
The days are getting longer, the first flowers come into bloom and a very specific set of hashtags are spreading through Social Media platforms – it’s spring again! In this blogpost I took a look at spring-related pictures on Instagram. Right now, the use of hashtags on Instagram has not entered the mainstream. For this [...]
Here’s a network visualization of all tweets referring to the hashtag “#strataconf” (click to enlarge). The node size is representing the number of incoming links, i.e. the number of times this person has been mentioned in other people’s tweets:
This network map has been generated in three steps:
1) Data collection: I collected [...]
While getting ready for the Strata Conference in Santa Clara, I prepared a network map showing the most important companies represented at the conference and their connections via venture capital or investment firms (click to enlarge). See you at the conference!
Everybody knows Cloudera, MapR, Splunk, 10Gen and Hortonworks. But what about Platfora or Hadapt? These 10 startups are my bet on which big data companies will probably be game-changers in 2012:
Platfora aims at providing a “revolutionary BI and analytics platform that democratizes and simplifies the use [...]
Big data as substitution for people? That sounds like a cyberneticist’s daydream to you? Michael Rappa, Director of the Institute for Advanced Analytics at the North Carolina State University does not think so. In this FORBES interview, he explains the advantages of a “data-driven corporate culture”:
“Data has a potentially objective quality. It accelerates [...]
The minute, the World Economic Forum at Davos said farewell to about 2,500 participants from almost 100 countries, our network analytical machines switched into production mode. Here’s the first result: a network map of the Twitter conversations related to the hashtags “#WEF” and “#Davos”. While there are only 2,500 participants, there are almost 36,000 unique [...]
- Beautiful Data - Musings on Big Data, Network Science and Information Visualization by Benedikt Koehler and Joerg Blumtritt
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