Think smart, think big - data that is

Two postings  appeared on Cisco's blog recently. The first announced the acquisition of Ireland based ThinkSmart Technologies and the second announced a webinar on big data. Neither referenced the other. Yet the links between them are significant. The ThinkSmart acquisition suggests that Cisco plans to use big data technologies to extract value from the vast amounts of data generated by wireless networks and their associated devices.

ThinkSmart Technologies developed software to analyse location data gathered from Wi-Fi infrastructure. According to Cisco's head of corporate business development, Hilton Romanski, "ThinkSmart's location analytics collects information on movement within a venue including time of day, traffic patterns and dwell times. This information helps enterprises and venue operators improve the customer experience by identifying appropriate staffing levels, reducing wait times, optimising business processes, and improving customer flows."

Meanwhile, Cisco senior vice president
 and technology evangelist Carlos Dominguez announced "a very special webcast from New York City Tuesday, October 2 called the 'Human Face of Big Data – Mission Control'," at which he says he will be "talking about 'data in motion' and its impact on wisdom."

According to Dominguez, "Data in motion comes in real time from a variety of sources, including the rapidly growing number of sensors, and is evaluated in meaningful ways that lead to knowledge and wisdom. The value of data is often dictated by time or its velocity – being at its highest value as it is created."

This high value data from which knowledge and wisdom will be extracted by big data technologies would, he suggested, come from sensors "the new Internet inhabitants that will change the face of our understanding of the world," that will be "simple, extremely smart, deliver significant value, and device agnostic."

We will, he said: "be able to access them virtually anywhere via the cloud, and all will generate significant amounts of data."

But there are already a vast number of 'sensors' - existing devices on wireless networks, WiFi and cellular and ThinkSmart Technologies seems to have been well advanced in the application of 'big data' analytics technologies to this information.

Not that you can find much information about the company any more. Any link to its web site redirects to a brief acquisition announcement on Cisco's web site.

Fortunately Google cached a few interesting pages shortly before the deal. So it is possible to read ThinkSmart's claim that: "To date various methods have been tried with limited results…to accurately understand large volumes [of data] which if accurately and consistently solved provides enormous value to all interested parties."

ThinkSmart claimed to have "combined techniques from maths and artificial intelligence using optimisation, clustering and pattern recondition technologies to develop the most accurate method to date for showing and predicting the actual movements and patterns that are hidden within the data with a high degree of accuracy."

For example it claimed that: "a set of over five million records of WiFi signals within an airport over a weekend period, which on its own is a mass of unmanageable data can be transformed into meaningful and actionable intelligence."

ThinkSmart was founded in 2009 as a spin-out from the University of Cork it claims to have leveraged "disruptive technology built on over 10 years of cutting edge research at the Cork Constraint Computation Centre…the world's largest and leading centre in Constraint Programming with close to 50 researchers working on making optimisation technology better and more easy to use."

ThinkSmart has been incorporated into Cisco's Wireless Networking Group and Cisco's plans for the company, as revealed publicly, seem to be fairly narrowly constrained, but given the company's enthusiasm for the prospects of big data I suspect it might have bigger plans for ThinkSmart's technologies.

 This article first appeared on iTWire, Australia's leading independent IT&T news and information source.