Big Data: Practical Applications [Scanning the Issue]

The Special Issue of Proceedings of the IEEE discusses papers which focus on the practical applications of big data. A paper titled ' Big Data Analysis for Media Production' by Blat and colleagues presents solutions to improve the integration of multiple data sources and understand their quality and content, which are useful both to support creative decisions on set (or near it) and enhance the postproduction process. 'Parallel Processing Systems for Big Data: A Survey' by Zhang and colleagues. discusses many new parallel data processing systems in addition to the approaches using traditional database management systems (DBMS). Classification of Big Data With Application to Imaging Genetics' by Ulfarsson and colleagues estimates the covariance by using a sparse version of noisy principal component analysis (nPCA). Going Digital: A Survey on Digitalization and Large-Scale Data Analytics in Healthcare' by Tresp and colleagues provides an overview of the recent trends toward digitalization and large-scale data analytics in health-care, both of which are instrumental in the dramatic changes in the way health-care will be organized in the future. In 'Some Comments on the Analysis of 'Big' Scientific Time Series' by Thomson and Vernon Experience, gained from long-time series from space, climate, seismology, and engineering, has demonstrated the need for even longer data series with better precision, timing, and larger instrument arrays.