big data

Big data is changing the world, but is it for the better? Liberty Vittert, professor of practice in data science at Olin Business School, discusses big data’s even bigger impact.

Anthropologist T.R. Kidder in Arts & Sciences contributed to one of the first “big data” studies in archaeology to tackle broader questions of how humans have reshaped landscapes, ecosystems and potentially climate over millennia. The analysis published Aug. 30 in the journal Science challenges conventional ideas that man’s impact has been “mostly recent.”

Using a novel idea, as well as a rare union of separate centers within Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis’ Bauer Leadership Center and Center for Analytics and Business Insights together are holding a Data for Good conference Friday, Oct. 5, at Emerson Auditorium, Knight Hall, as part of the David R. Calhoun Lectureship series.

For the first time, a group of researchers at Washington University in St. Louis used a big-data approach to determine the effects of minimum-wage changes on business. The Olin Business School faculty processed wage data on more than 2 million hourly workers from across the country over a six-year period. The results? There are winners and losers.

​Crunching big data, especially from social networking sites, is one of the hottest areas of study in business schools right now.  A new center at Washington University in St. Louis is teaching students best practices when it comes to data mining and analysis. Seethu Seetharaman, PhD, the W. Patrick McGinnis Professor of Marketing, is the center’s director.

As big data moves to the forefront of the boardroom, how do businesses keep up and find qualified people to manage it all? Olin Business School aims to help solve this problem with the launch of its Master of Science in Customer Analytics degree, offered in partnership with IBM.