A sea of data

Although 11.5 million is a large number, most readers probably had no idea what went into drawing meaningful conclusions from that huge cache of documents. In fact, it took some 400 journalists at more than 100 news organizations an entire year to peruse the 2.6 terabytes of data in those documents and piece together the story of a company that helped the world's wealthiest people set up offshore bank accounts. In a lecture hosted by the University of Delaware Cybersecurity Initiative on Wednesday, April 6, computer scientist James Nolan used the Panama Papers as an example of the need for new machine learning techniques to address the problems associated with living in a data-rich, information-poor world. "Why can't we put that 2.6 terabytes through an algorithm and spit out relationships in a few hours?" he asked. Nolan emphasized the distinction between raw data which is collected from cameras, phones, sensors, satellites, written documents, cyber-logs, and other sources and information, which is the knowledge gained from studying data and teasing out relationships, resolving ambiguities, understanding scenes, and labeling events.