Big Data: Hype and Reality

ABSTRACT

Over a decade after the rise of Big Data, this talk revisits the promises, disruptions, and realities that shaped modern data management. We trace how large-scale analytics—driven by Web 2.0 demands—pushed systems beyond traditional relational databases toward flexible architectures integrating text analytics, entity resolution, and machine learning. Using real-world applications such as financial risk modeling, recommendation engines, and fraud detection, we examine what worked, what failed, and why. The talk connects Big Data’s trajectory to today’s AI and LLM wave, highlighting recurring hype cycles, scalability limits, evolving hardware trends, and growing regulatory pressures. We argue that despite technological shifts, enduring principles—good data, sound system design, and pragmatic integration—remain central to building robust, future-ready analytics platforms.

SPEAKER BIO

Dr. C. Mohan is currently a Distinguished Professor of Science at Hong Kong Baptist University, a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University in China, and a member of the inaugural Board of Governors of Digital University Kerala in India. He retired in 2020 from being an IBM Fellow at the IBM Almaden Research Center in Silicon Valley. He was an IBM researcher for 38.5 years in the database, blockchain, AI and related areas, impacting numerous IBM and non-IBM products, the research and academic communities, and standards, especially with his invention of the well-known ARIES family of database locking and recovery algorithms, and the Presumed Abort distributed commit protocol. This IBM (1997-2020), ACM (2002-) and IEEE (2002-) Fellow has also served as the IBM India Chief Scientist (2006-2009). In addition to receiving the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award (1996), the VLDB 10 Year Best Paper Award (1999) and numerous IBM awards, Mohan was elected to the United States and Indian National Academies of Engineering (2009). This Distinguished Alumnus of IIT Madras (1977) received his PhD at the University of Texas at Austin (1981). He is an inventor of 50 patents.