Recently, we had the opportunity to talk with Nuria Oliver, Scientific Director at Telefónica I + D, about the changes that are taking place at the level of Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. We tell you.
Within today’s connected society, an unprecedented revolution is taking place, and we may not be fully aware of its consequences.
The amount of data that is continuously generated in the different social and economic areas: business, meteorology, medicine, logistics… is such that nothing similar has existed in the history of humanity. A process that, in the end, ends up digitizing human behavior. If we combine the combination of the systems of the Internet of Things with that huge sum of information, we get as a result billions of connected elements that in turn will generate more and more data. One of the objectives that the human being seeks, and that Nuria Oliver dreams, is the possibility of”achieving that remote connectivity can be as natural as a face-to-face”.
The impact of Artificial Intelligence
For Nuria Oliver, Artificial Intelligence has been a reality for a long time. Define two types:
- The one we use from the moment we wake up until we go to bed. We live with it all day long, as we interact with Artificial Intelligence systems while using our smartphones to, for example, query maps on Google. Voice recognition systems would be another example.
- An option that goes much further than the first, and that no longer contemplates only basic processes such as content recommendation, but the capacity for continuous learning in any situation.
The future is about Big Data
In this context, we need to understand and analyze all that data that would otherwise be “digital garbage”. For this, “it is necessary to develop tools and techniques of data analysis, of Artificial Intelligence, that can find meaning in them to take advantage of them,” explains Nuria.
One of the consequences of always having the mobile in your pocket is that we are connected at all times and that interactions are recorded. The work in the analysis of personal data, with consent, involves recommending to the user better and more relevant content according to the characteristics of each one.
All this ability can be used to help society, and that’s where the the concept of Big Data for Social Good. In short, the data, analyzed and classified, can have a positive impact on society, helping organizations and governments to make better decisions. They allow us to better understand the mobility patterns of a city or country after, for example, a natural disaster. In these cases, they make it possible to determine which are the areas where there are more people affected.
Strategic technologies
After seven years working with these research techniques, Nuria Oliver explains that the combination of Big Data with Artificial Intelligence in order to have a positive impact on society will end up helping all types of organizations to understand any situation thanks to the huge amount of information processed and the conclusions that can be derived from such analysis.
But the work of the scientific department of Telefónica I + D does not end there. In fact, another of his projects is the development of voice analysis to understand emotions. Identify, for example, in the context of customers whether they are satisfied or not; optimize networks to determine the placement of new antennas, etc.
Many of the projects have the impulse and development of the concept of Big Data and artificial intelligence as main keys.
