The challenge for the public sector is the much-needed team of data scientists, who if well-versed in their area have the potential to perform well. This was the opinion of J Satyanarayana, Chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) during his keynote address titled ‘Building Sustainable Big Data Platforms for e-Governance’ at the Fifth International Conference on Big Data Analytics-2017 being held at International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Hyderabad.
During his address, Satyanarayana pointed out that data from various sources such as social media formed large areas of unstructured data and that they can be utilised to learn about the people’s viewpoint about the government. “The unstructured data comes from newspapers, Facebook, Twitter and whatever that is available in the public domain. These are digested on an hourly basis. They talk about the problems in various areas and the grievances,” he was quoted saying about the subject in a paper.
The chairman of UDAI highlighted how Big Data Analysis can enable governments in decision making and the important role it performs in real-time governance. He also spoke about the DataLytics program of the Andhra Pradesh Government and how datalytics can be applied across various sectors.
The ex-secretary of DeITY (Department of Electronics and Information Technology), took over as the chairman of UDAI in 2016, and has acknowledged the close connection between technology and governance on other occasions too. “Technology, policy and governance are more or less inter-connected deeply in several ways… For these three things to function in a vibrant manner we need citizen-centric policies, open technologies which will lead to good governance,” he was quoted saying recently.
International Conference on Big Data Analytics was first held in New Delhi in 2012 and has since then been held annually. The 4 day conference that is underway, kicked off on 12 December with the ‘Workshop Program’ where the inaugural talk was delivered by Rakesh Ranjan, member of Niti Aayog.The 4 day conference that will conclude on the 15 December, will see renowned experts in the area of big data congregate at IIIT, Hyderabad during the event.
